Altruistic World Online Library

For those absolutely devoid of scruples, charity fraud is the field par excellance, in which you can simultaneously harvest kudos for your humanitarianism and make off with vast bundles of untaxed cash. Convictions for charity fraud are so rare as to be nonexistent, so any criminals operating in other fields of endeavor are incurring unnecessary risks.

Once a year the 1001 Club invites its members to the exclusive Panda Ball. One dines and discusses the future of the world in select company. Is the Club just a sentimental relict of the founding era with no significance for current WWF policy, as Rob Soutter tried to convince me in our meeting at WWF headquarters in Gland, Switzerland? If it really is just a harmless group of aging nature-loving aristocrats, why are their gatherings as secretive as the Cosa Nostra? Why do members pay a 25,000-dollar initiation fee? What unseen bonds exist amongst the elite 1001?

I knew that if I could get a look at the secret membership list it would help shed light on these matters. It wasn't easy, but after several months of patient research I finally held two editions of the mystery list in my hand -- one from 1978, the other from 1987. Both of them came from the estate of British journalist Kevin Dowling, whose early film about the African misadventures of the WWF was never aired. The two lists can now be found on the Internet.

The 1001 Club membership lists available included a remarkably large share of South Africans. In addition to Anton Rupert, owner of Rothmans International and Cartier, a few dozen other leading lights of the apartheid regime -- almost all of them were former or present members of the white-supremacist group Broederbund. The only black African to have found his way into the elite white brotherhood was the Dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Most club members were previous or present top dogs in the oil or mining industries, banking or shipping. Conversation at the Panda Ball presumably does not revolve solely around endangered tigers, elephants and songbirds; talk also surely turns to topics such as business prospects in the energy and food sectors. Most club members have directly influenced the political and economic history of their home countries -- leaving a large ecological footprint behind in their wake.

Membership Number 572

The name behind the 1001 Club membership number 572, Jose Martinez de Hoz, is probably unknown to most. Based in Buenos Aires, Martinez de Hoz is an Argentine oligarch with blood on his hands. He owns over a million hectares of land, is a wild game hunter and founding member of the Argentine WWF, which is called Fundacion Vida Silvestre Argentina (FVSA). [48] But most Argentines don't think of Martinez de Hoz as an animal lover: his biggest claim to fame is serving as Minister of the Economy during the military dictatorship of Videla.

Unfortunately I was not able to meet Jose Martinez de Hoz in person, because in the summer of 2010 he had been arrested for crimes against humanity -- after twenty years of living unchallenged, escaping justice. At this writing he was under house arrest. His attorney conveyed the message that his client did not wish to accept visitors. There is a photograph of Martinez de Hoz shortly before his arrest: a gaunt old man on his way home with a baker's bag in his hand. Hard to believe that the sensitive-looking geriatric with the friendly smile had been the number two man in a brutal and bloody military dictatorship that had ordered the killing of around 30,000 of its own citizens, most of them men and women in the bloom of youth.

As Minister of the Economy, Martinez de Hoz had concerned himself with the "modernization" of the Argentine economy, opening the country to the global market and for foreign investors. He was a man with outstanding international contacts, which his membership in the exclusive WWF club no doubt helped him to cultivate. Even after being confined under house arrest to his luxury residence in the Kavanagh high-rise apartment house Martinez de Hoz was still allowed to pursue his business activities undisturbed. Like all wealthy Argentines, he too had invested a lot of money in soy, the foremost plant-based energy crop in the age of the "green economy". And Jose Martinez de Hoz is not alone: other top functionaries of the Argentine WWF have also harvested the dubious fruits of Argentina's transformation into a soy republic.

On the flight from Washington D.C. to Buenos Aires we flew over northern Argentina at dawn. From above, the green landscape looked like the region's famous Pampa. In fact, the vast deforested expanses beneath us were industrial soy fields. The 1,500-kilometer flight from Salta in the north to Buenos Aires meant 1,500 kilometers of soy monoculture. A full one half of Argentina's arable land is now covered with the "green gold" -- genetically modified soy from GMO giant Monsanto. The soy monoculture has spread to neighboring countries Brazil and Paraguay like a galloping cancerous growth.

Biofuel from soy for Europe and the USA is eating away the farmland of the people in the Southern Hemisphere -- with the ruthless if indirect support of the WWF. Below us small crop duster planes flew across the seemingly endless fields: they were spraying the Monsanto herbicide Roundup, a substance Monsanto chemists had developed from Agent Orange, the notorious, highly toxic defoliant used by the USA in Vietnam to strip the Viet Cong of their lush forest cover.

The Soy Dictatorship

The huge jacaranda trees on the Plaza San Martin had dropped millions of blossoms. Over the purple petal carpet walked the man we had come to meet: Jorge Rulli, known in Argentina for his relentless opposition to the country's soy policies. He looked up squinting, his hand protecting his eyes from the blazing sun. Rulli scanned the high-rise that housed his former archenemy Jose Martinez de Hoz.

The battles Jorge Rulli has fought in his life had left their mark: a thick bull's neck, a short crop of unruly snow-white hair covering a massive skull and continuing on uninterrupted to form a bristly beard. His weathered features had dug their way deep into his face; torture had left him blind in one eye. In 1967, while Che Guevara was forming his guerrilla unit in the Bolivian jungle, Jorge Rulli had been arrested in Argentina for the first time and ferociously mistreated in custody. His interrogators wanted to know what his mentor Che Guevara was planning for Argentina. The charismatic revolutionary leader had, in fact, considered returning to Argentina after Bolivia to ignite the fire of social revolution in his homeland. But events took a different turn than planned, with a brutal response from the old oligarchy: in the 1970s military dictators seized power throughout South America. It was the beginning of a dark era.

Jorge Rulli was arrested for a second time and brought to a secret prison where he was held and tortured for a year, during which time his wife and children didn't know whether he was dead or alive. Later he had been sentenced to five years in prison. Yet Jorge Rulli told us he did not wish to exact vengeance on Martinez de Hoz: "He is one of the key figures responsible for the dictatorship, but it's too late to make him pay for his crimes. Now he's sitting up there, a lonely old man locked up with his wife -- that's punishment enough."

Jorge laughed at his own grim joke and pointed at the glass facade on the opposite side of the square, home to the Argentine branch of Monsanto. According to Jorge Rulli the US-based multinational was now the "secret government of Argentina". He compared it in complete earnest to the military dictatorship: "The monoculture enforced by Monsanto is just as terrible as the military dictatorship. It is destroying my country down to the very roots. Argentina is now the world's biggest open-air laboratory for genetic engineering."

In 1996 the Argentine government became the first in South America to revoke the prohibition against genetically modified (GM) crops, and proceeded to permit more than half of the country's farmlands to be transformed into a soy wasteland. Argentina is now the world's largest supplier of soybean oil. The majority of it goes to the refineries that make biodiesel for the European market; the rest goes into feed concentrate for intensive livestock farming in the USA, China and Europe. Argentina's political class wants to use soy to help rapidly industrialize the country and thus payoff national debt. A 35 percent share of the profits from soybean biodiesel flows into government coffers in the form of export duty.

Despite impressive growth figures Rulli did not see the soy model as a success. "The chemicals are destroying the arable soil, the smallholders are being driven out, food supplies have become scarce and expensive. Argentina can no longer even produce enough meat for its own population. But that doesn't bother the government, because the income from the soy export duty is so high that they can use it to support the subsistence of the hundreds of thousands of Argentines who have fled the countryside for the slums of the cities."

Jorge Rulli

I wanted to know what position the WWF took on Argentina's genetic agricultural revolution. After all, the massive expansion of soy production had exacted a sacrifice not only of farmland for food crops but vast forest areas as well. According to data from the forestry authorities, since 1914 close to half of Argentina's Chaco Province forest had been chopped down. [49] From 2003 on, the tempo of the destruction had accelerated as the soy industry initiated its great leap forward. Continuous satellite surveillance conducted by the conservationist organization Guyra has shown: in May 2012 the deforestation rate was 710 hectares a day. The Argentine WWF has raised resistance, using a study to make its case for classifying 49 percent of the remaining Chaco as "especially valuable" habitat subject to strict protection measures. But that was not enough to reconcile WWF critic Jorge Rulli with the organization: by defining 49 percent of the forest as "especially worthy of protection" the WWF was accepting in principle that the rest would be overrun by agribusiness: "In Argentina the FVSA (Fundacion Vida Silvestre Argentina) is not a nature conservancy organization in a literal sense. It and Monsanto are two arms of the same body. Monsanto created the agricultural model that is now predominant in our country -- and the FVSA/ WWF Argentina is making every effort to make it socially acceptable. It says: GM soy isn't so bad; it can even be produced 'sustainably.'"

Sizing me up, Jorge Rulli sensed that I still had my doubts. He suggested I get in touch with the father of the Argentine "soy miracle". "He doesn't actually give interviews, but as a German your chances with him are pretty good."

A Patriarch's Dialogue

Dr. Hector Laurence

Dr. Hector Laurence did, in fact, agree without hesitation to a meeting. Laurence is the godfather of the Argentine model: a long-time player in the soy business, in 2005 he also became president of the IFAMA (International Food and Agribusiness Association). For many years he had also been the South America representative for two foreign GMO firms: Morgan Seeds and Pioneer, a subsidiary of the chemicals giant DuPont. During the same period, from 1998 to 2008, he was president of the Fundacion Vida Silvestre Argentina. In 1988 the FVSA had become an associate member of the WWF.

I met with Dr. Laurence in his office, which was discreetly decorated in subdued shades of colonial blue. The building was on the upscale Avenida 9 de Julio, one of the best addresses in Buenos Aires. The scion of an English immigrant family, Dr. Laurence was a gentleman from top to toe. Although he and his nemesis Jorge Rulli were almost the same age, Hector Laurence appeared younger. That might have been due to his carefully parted gray-free hair, or to his country club outfit: blue blazer, gray flannel trousers, the pungent smell of a musky deodorant. The steely gaze of his blue eyes and each of his vigorous-yet-controlled gestures clearly communicated that he belonged to the Argentine elite. "Diplomatic waffle" was not his thing, said Dr. Laurence. "You Europeans must be told straight out that you are quite backward in some areas, especially when it comes to modern technologies. You have become the victims of leftwing hysterics who denounce genetic engineering as the work of the devil -- instead of listening to science."

I tried to maintain a neutral expression as I posed the key question of my visit: what did the WWF think about the fact that the soil of Argentina was now drenched with Monsanto's herbicide? Hadn't recent laboratory testing by Argentine pharmacologist Prof. Carrasco determined that Roundup damaged human genetic material? Dr. Laurence furrowed his statesmanlike brow and pondered for a moment before answering in English: "Those experiments are pseudo-scientific propaganda. If you invite me to drink a glass of Roundup or to smell it for a couple of hours directly -- no, I would say, this can hurt me, of course. But on the other hand, like anything if you use a new product -- and I don't have any relationship with Monsanto, I want to be very clear on that -- if you talk about the risks of technology, in terms of accidents or illnesses, we should then eliminate planes and eliminate cars."

He looked at me for a few seconds in amusement, waiting to see how I would react to his clever comparison. I held my tongue, so he continued, switching back to Spanish: "The romantics pine for the old Pampa. That's ridiculous. We soy entrepreneurs are farmers too, when it comes down to it; the land is our most important capital. We care for it and safeguard it. Anyone can invest in soy. We no longer need farmers to have agriculture. That has boosted Argentina's efficiency enormously. the Pampa is experiencing a veritable agricultural revolution."

Dr. Laurence related with pride how he had founded the National Genetic Technology Commission to familiarize the population with the blessings of this technology. In backward Argentina you had to promote progress a bit, because Monsanto had done "bad PR work, so that many people thought that genetic engineering would lead to babies being born with fish heads and similar nonsense. We have to help Monsanto to market its products more credibly."

I reminded the master of dialogue that the industrial cultivation of genetically engineered crops was eliminating vast areas of forest and conventional farmland. At this, deep worry lines creased Dr. Laurence's forehead -- it seemed a struggle was raging between the naturalist and the entrepreneur within him: "Cut-throat competition is unavoidable in a free-market economy. That's why a few secondary forests had to be sacrificed to achieve our ambitious target of 100 million. But arable land is affected more than forests. Some products have experienced losses: sorghum, livestock farming, sunflowers and wheat."

For Monsanto the endorsement of the "new green revolution" by Fundacion Vida Silvestre was heaven sent -- after years of fighting for moral support for its genetic interventions into nature. With the backing of an Argentinian bishop, Monsanto had attempted to prompt the Pope to put in a good word for genetic engineering. Nothing doing: the Church remained firm. The WWF was the port of last resort. After all, it too had moral authority in society-at-large -- when the WWF talked, people listened. Dr. Laurence summed up with pride: "With the help of the WWF" Argentina was now "a green world power." The 100 million ton goal was achieved in 2010. But that, said Laurence, was just the beginning: "We're going to double the target to 200 million." WWF International, too, he added, had now come out in support of genetic engineering "thanks to our pioneering work in Argentina".

At the end of this highly instructive conversation I asked Dr. Laurence what he thought of WWF Argentina founder Dr. Martinez de Hoz: "I know and value him; a great man who served his nation. He is wrongly under house arrest. Like so many defendants from the era of the military government, he has done nothing wrong, I swear to that."

Still reeling from the revisionist history lesson, I fired a final shot: would Dr. Laurence succeed Martinez de Hoz as a member of the WWF 1001 Club? I believe I caught a sheepish grin flitting across the tanned face before me: "I still haven't been asked, but it may happen yet." With such extensive service to his country it would, of course, be a rude injustice to deny him the ascent to the ranks of WWF nobility.

On the Soy Highway

The next morning I drove to the village of Marcos Paz, west of Buenos Aires. The invincible rebel-with-a-cause Jorge Rulli had created an island of peace and tranquility there. He and his family live in an old farmhouse and have transformed the rest of the land into a Garden of Eden of lush, rambling vegetable patches and flower beds. He used seeds gathered on his travels. In the modern supermarkets, said Jorge Rulli, you could only buy big brand name, imported "standardized food". The old traditional village markets used to have a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables: "It's all over with the variety. The globalization of the food industry has led to a dramatic impoverishment of the human diet."

We had a long, uncomfortable drive ahead of us, going north on the "soy highway". The temperature rose by the hour as we approached the equator. To the left and right the soy fields stretched across vast desolate areas like huge brown cloths. We made a stop at a village called Tuyuti, where we met the last remaining farmer still at work: breeding polo ponies for export to the rich Gulf States. The other farms lay in ruins.

At last count there were 1,000 "abandoned" villages in Argentina. When the majority of farmers sell up for good money to the soy companies, the villagers all end up leaving. 61 percent of the area now covered by soy fields in Argentina used to be pastures where cattle grazed, or farmland with crops of wheat, sorghum, potatoes, maize, sunflowers, rice, barley, beans and cotton. Over 400,000 farmers have already given up on agriculture and migrated to the cities. In Tuyuti the only teacher in the village school had only a dozen children left in her class; it used to be four times that.

At the sight of the dilapidated schoolhouse, rage welled up in Jorge's heart: "With the decline of the villages the culture of the Pampa has disappeared. People are abandoning the countryside because they have no work here anymore. Those who remain risk being poisoned to death. Roundup is the drug of the Argentine economy."

Roundup: brand advertising

We spotted the first crop-duster in the distance. Called a Mosquito, it left a huge toxic cloud trailing behind: Roundup from Monsanto. The poisonous substance drizzled down onto the fields where the still small soy plants fought grasses, herbs and weeds for space. The next day, all the plants were brown and dead, except for the soy. It had survived thanks to a special gene built in to resist the toxic herbicide.

Buyers of Monsanto seed are obliged to purchase the companion herbicide Roundup to go with it. "This 'package deal'," says Jorge Rulli, "makes the farmers dependent on Monsanto. At the end of the day, the Roundup Ready model means total corporate control of agricultural production. Apart from that, Roundup contaminates the ground water and the rivers. Amphibians have died off in our rivers. When they start using that poison even the rats and snakes flee to the cities. We are on the precipice of an ecological collapse, but the WWF tells us, in effect: everything's fine; soy is good; you can plant soy sustainably."

We continued on our road trip across the green-brown monotony of the soy landscape until we reached the port city of Rosario on the shores of the broad, brown Parana River. Every day hundreds of transport trucks full of soy arrive from all corners of the country at the harbor. From there the freight is shipped off to Europe -- or it lands in one of the new refineries that line the riverbanks. They hungrily swallow up the soybeans and discharge them again in the form of biodiesel. Rosario is the heart that pumps the green oil into the bloodstream of the global economy.

Aided by billions in subventions, the European feed-in obligation for biofuels has created an artificial global biofuel market; by the year 2020, according to the EU directive, 10 percent of the fuel in Europe's vehicles must be plant-based. The USA has a similar provision. Arable land is in short supply in Europe, and thus very costly, so biofuel production has been farmed out to the Southern Hemisphere.

The booming biofuel industry has invested billions and given rise to brand new business alliances: automakers such as VW and Toyota are to be found in new consortiums with energy companies BP and Shell, as well as agribusinesses such as Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and Dreyfus. In the age of the "green economy" energy and agribusinesses are fusing. 95 percent of the diesel oil produced in Argentina goes to Europe. The ugly word "bioimperialism" is making the rounds in Latin America, Asia and Africa -- wherever vast areas have been devoted to fuel crops. The global north is solving its energy problems at the expense of the global south.

Soy Leftists

In earlier, simpler days Jorge Rulli could blame all the evils of the world on the rightwing oligarchs. Nowadays things are a bit more complicated. After all, the presidents and politicians who have pushed the soy model through in South America have mainly been leftwing: "Even Lula in Brazil joined in, although genetic engineering was prohibited in his country. Monsanto smuggled the genetically modified seed out of Argentina over the borders to Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil and gave it away to the farmers in these neighboring countries."

This was to be expected of Monsanto, said Rulli, but the leftwing governments could have said no. Instead they had played the doorman, ushering Monsanto in: "After they were defeated, the left could have rebounded by becoming an ecological left; instead, they humbly conformed. The chief ideologists of the soy model weren't reactionaries, they were leftists. 40 years ago they were making homemade bombs, which provided a pretense for the putsch, and now they're the loyal servants of Monsanto. History certainly turns some strange somersaults."

Gustavo Grobocopatel, for example, is now one of Argentina's biggest soy barons. He used to be a card-carrying Communist and a welcome guest in the Soviet Union. Hector Huergo was once the chief ideologist of the Trotskyite Party. Nowadays he's editor-in-chief of the agricultural supplement to Argentina's biggest newspaper Clarin and has transformed himself into the ideological mastermind of the soy revolution: "He used to demand agricultural reform and the expropriation of large estate holders; now he's leading the corporate counterrevolution in the countryside."

"Despite the fact that Stalin deliberately helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power, despite the Nazi-Communist alliance of 1939-41 under the Hitler-Stalin Pact, despite Mussolini's close ties to Moscow, despite the deep affinity between Nazi-fascists and communists demonstrated repeatedly in many countries by mass exchanges of membership between political organizations of the two persuasions, the average American still sees communism and Nazism-fascism as polar opposites.

Jorge Rulli still keeps in touch with his old comrade: "I ran into Hector at a discussion meeting and asked him if he wasn't ashamed to be transforming Argentina into a new colony whose only role is to supply the powerful countries in the north with biofuel. He laughed at me and said: 'My dear Jorge, you're stuck in a 70s mentality.' I stayed nice and friendly and said: 'Okay, our opinions on the economic model differ, but at least admit that we're losing all our biodiversity.' He grinned at me: 'Biodiversity? That can be recreated in the laboratory.' He's become a cynical champagne socialist who's embedded himself in government and is living there like bee in clover. Sometimes I even wish we had the military dictatorship back -- at least you knew who were the good guys and who were the bad."

In Monsanto's Close Embrace

400 kilometers farther to the west we stopped our rattling Peugeot just outside the small town of Laboulaye, because in the otherwise uninhabited landscape we had come across a human being: Fabricio Castillos. The soy farmer was busy repairing his broken-down crop-spraying vehicle. As it turned out, he was an independent small business owner with 130 hectares of land -- and a contract to supply one of the biggest soy companies in Argentina, Gustavo Grobocopatel, which pays the current global market price for the soybeans. The farmer alone carries the production risks: "When I first started it all worked great. For the first few years Monsanto gave us the seeds for virtually nothing. In the meantime the prices have risen drastically. The herbicide Roundup is really expensive. We have to keep spraying more and more because the weeds have become resistant. This year I used twice as much Roundup as I did five years ago. It doesn't pay anymore."

I asked a naive question: why he didn't just switch to conventional soy, which was also still sought after on the global market? The farmer shook his head: "I'm surrounded by genetically modified soy. It would immediately contaminate my seeds. Besides, Monsanto has already bought up most of the seed companies in Argentina. You have to travel far and wide to find conventional seed."

The "green gold" was driving the farmer into bankruptcy. If soy production proved uneconomic, wouldn't it just do away with itself? The farmer had to laugh: "Unfortunately not. With my 130 hectares I can no longer make any profit; someone with 500 hectares can still make a living, but at some point you'll need 5,000 hectares. Soon the whole country will belong to just a few investment companies," said the last of the Mohicans and started off in his sprayer. Time is money.

From Laboulaye we drove almost 1,000 kilometers northwards without stopping. We saw no intact forest areas along the way, only endless fields of soy and maize monocultures. Where were the "high value" forests the WWF claims to have saved through its constructive dialogue with industry? Jorge Rulli didn't know either: "The forests that have been spared are mainly up in the mountains, so they're of no interest to industrial agriculture. The FVSA/WWF Argentina appears to be satisfied with the existing national parks. What's even worse: they're not really doing anything to stop the destruction of the forests in favor of the soy industry." As he spoke these words he fished a big stack of paper out of his briefcase: the minutes of the meeting of the Forum of the 100 Million.

"Someone" had passed the minutes on to him. The document proves that the WWF had actively participated in choosing which forest areas would be approved for destruction. At the September 2004 meeting of the Forum, WWF representative Juan Rodrigo Walsh reported on the achievements of his working group, the Initiative for Forest Conversion, headed by himself. From the beginning the goal of the Forum had been to transform 5 to 12 million hectares into land suitable for the "sustainable" production of grain and oil fruit. The minutes of the forum meeting from Sept. 9th 2004 read: "Juan Rodrigo Walsh reported on the progress made by the Initiative for Forest Conversion, which he coordinates in Argentina and Paraguay with the support of the WWF via the FVSA (WWF Argentina). He described the methods and steps being taken in this dialogue-led process. He concentrated in his report on the subject of sustainability -- on a worldwide scale." [50]

The sacrifice of the forest apparently posed no problem for Dr. Laurence, head of the FVSA/WWF Argentina at the time. Because, according to him, thanks to the soy fields, the Pampa was "greener now than before". Furthermore, to combat soil erosion many agribusinesses were even leaving untouched green strips between the huge monoculture fields: "Those are green corridors, which allow animals to move freely over a wide area in search of mating partners. Thus biodiversity is maintained."

For Dr. Laurence the soy boom is a great boon: "It is contributing to saving our planet." Because when cultivating GM soy the fields no longer need to be plowed before the seeds are sown. "This means", according to Dr. Laurence, "that the greenhouse gas CO2 stays in the ground and is not released into the atmosphere. A tremendous contribution to climate protection." The soy industry, with Monsanto leading the way, has in the meantime gone before the United Nations World Climate Council to propose rewarding this type of "no-till agriculture" with carbon credits. The UN Climate Council is still hesitant, but the lobbyists are applying pressure, as is, not insignificantly, the WWF.

Should tillage be used to control resistant weeds?By Nufarm February 25, 2015

Tillage is one option for destroying emerged glyphosate-resistant horseweed before planting, but there are no herbicide options to control it after planting when weeds reach this size, says Purdue University weed scientist Bryan Young. Hand pulling is the only option to prevent seed production.Photo by Purdue University

Herbicide-resistant weeds: The tillage dilemma

“Do we need to till or not?” Purdue University weed scientist Bryan Young often hears this question from Midwest soybean growers fighting herbicide-resistant marestail, waterhemp and Palmer amaranth.

In parts of the south, multi-herbicide-resistant Palmer pigweeds have forced growers to include or intensify tillage, Young says. Likewise, in western Kansas, glyphosate-resistant kochia has led some dryland wheat growers to resort to tillage.

But before Midwest farmers put steel to the ground to attack resistant weeds, he says, it’s important to understand weed biology.Tillage affects not only emerged weeds but also germination and weed seed banks. Tillage decisions must also balance weed control and soil conservation. Equally important, growers who resort to tillage for weed control should also adopt a diversified herbicide program.

Young says to think about weed emergence patterns and tillage timing first. Conventional pre-plant tillage is an effective way to control winter annuals such as horseweed and summer annuals that germinate early such as giant ragweed.

Keep in mind that you need more aggressive tillage for weed control than for residue management. For example, vertical tillage tools “can be a hindrance as much as a help in weed control,” says agronomist Monty Webb, Southern FS, Inc., Marion, Ill. “Often, vertical tillage injures weeds but doesn’t kill them.” While the root systems remain intact, injured weeds don’t take up herbicide well, so they are very hard to kill, he notes. For spring vertical tillage, Webb recommends a burndown first to avoid spraying injured weeds.

The biggest weed problem for Jarrett Nehring, a Murphysboro, Illinois no-till farmer, is waterhemp with three-way resistance to glyphosate, ALS and PPO herbicides. Pre-plant tillage is useless for managing these weeds, which emerge after corn. “Waterhemp is still emerging when corn is head high,” he says.

When it comes to pigweeds, pre-plant tillage “just moves the seeds around in the soil,” Young says. In fact, spring tillage can actually intensify waterhemp pressure after planting by triggering more germination. “In terms of weed emergence, tillage is like turning on a light switch,” he adds. “Pigweeds will come faster and there will be more of them.”

In Illinois trials last year, tillage performed May 20 knocked down emerged waterhemp plants but caused a six-fold spike in waterhemp emergence over the following two weeks, compared to no tillage. Tillage on June 7 sparked a 14-fold increase in waterhemp emergence. The same thing happened with Palmer amaranth.

One-time deep tillage

By contrast, deep tillage inverts the soil and buries about 80% of weed seeds below the germination zone.

Certified crop adviser Stephen Morfeld, Linn, Mo., worked with a couple of farmers who pulled out the moldboard plow to deal with Roundup- and Flexstar-resistant waterhemp. One grower selectively plowed about 15 acres of a 50-acre continuous soybean field, burying weed seeds 10 inches deep through the heaviest populations. The grower also rotated the field to corn and switched up his chemical program.

“There was very low waterhemp pressure the next year,” Morfeld says. Deep tillage combined with rotation and herbicide diversification proved effective, and the benefits continued into the following soybean year.

Moldboard Plow

“If you have a bad waterhemp or Palmer amaranth problem, we know that one deep tillage operation to bury the seed can get that to a more manageable level,” says Kevin Bradley, University of Missouri weed scientist. “It’s not 100% effective, but there’s a dramatic reduction.” Missouri trials last year found that inverting the soil with a moldboard plow slashed pigweed densities five- to eight-fold compared with conventional tillage, minimum tillage or no tillage.

Earlier research from the University of Arkansas found a similar reduction, says Jason Norsworthy, University of Arkansas plant scientist. “We can take some selection pressure off herbicides by burying high weed seed populations,” he says. That allows other weed control measures to work better, too. For example, deep tillage combined with a cover crop of cereal rye cut Palmer amaranth emergence by about 93% over two years — more than double the reduction with deep tillage alone, Norsworthy says.

A last-resort tactic

Norsworthy and Bradley caution that deep tillage to control waterhemp or Palmer amaranth is a one-time-only tactic, however.

This strategy exploits two pigweed weaknesses, Bradley says: These small-seeded weeds, which are relatively short-lived in the soil, cannot emerge from lower depths. A 2001 Iowa State University study found that 89% of a waterhemp seed bank was no longer viable after being buried for four years.

“But that’s not 100%,” Norsworthy says. You can draw down the seed bank with deep tillage, “but you’re never going to eradicate resistant weed seeds.” And once resistance has evolved, “you almost never lose it.”

Running the plow every year will just bring resistant seeds back up to the germination zone, he says. “You want the seed to rot in the soil. Once you turn the soil over, you must prevent weeds from going to seed so you don’t have to flip the soil again.”

Although deep tillage can be effective, Morfeld points out that “it’s not always practical for our farming operations now. We’ve re-tooled, changed our practices.” While it’s a tactic some growers may have to consider, he warns that it should be used as a last resort.

It’s especially heartbreaking to see longtime no-tillers take steel to their soil again after decades, adds Morfeld, who has no-tilled for 40 years. “You lose your no-till advantages overnight.”

Because deep tillage raises erosion risk and destroys soil structure, “We don’t recommend this everywhere,” Bradley agrees. “But for nightmare situations and landscapes that are not highly erodible, it can make really bad field more manageable.” If you decide to go this route, “Do it once, and then get religion — don’t let it get that bad again.”

No-till advantages

Because no-till leaves waterhemp and Palmer amaranth seeds in the top inch of soil where they can germinate, some farmers think no-till is the worst choice for controlling these resistant weeds.

Not so fast, Young says. Seeds near the surface are more likely to be eaten by birds, insects and rodents. Predation removal in no-till can amount to a third or more of the seed bank, Young says, although losses are highly variable. For example, cover crops provide good habitat for mice, resulting in higher seed predation.

Seed mortality is greater in the top layer of soil too, Young says.

Georgia researchers reported in 2013 that the persistence of Palmer amaranth seed was directly related to the depth of burial. After 36 months, 9% of seeds in the top half-inch of soil were still viable, while 15% of seeds buried four inches deep remained alive.

Likewise, a study on waterhemp seed persistence in Illinois from 1996 to 2000 found that more than 10% of seeds buried 2 to 8 inches deep germinated after five years in the soil, compared to 3% in the top half-inch, Young says.

“In a deep-tilled environment, you might remove about 80% of the weed seeds from the germination zone, which alleviates some of the pressure for the following year,” he says. “However, you might increase the seed longevity in the soil in the following years.”

No-till production systems are also more likely to employ diversified herbicide programs that incorporate multiple modes of effective action, Young says. That’s confirmed by the Benchmark Study, a multi-state research program carried out from 2006 to 2010 at 154 sites in the Midwest and south. The study found that soybean growers who use tillage are nearly twice as likely as no-tillers to rely on glyphosate alone. This suggests that “the most at-risk sites for developing glyphosate resistance may be tilled fields,” Young says.

“So far, we’ve left tillage out of it. We started applying fall chemicals to keep marestail from coming up,” says Nehring. In the spring, they switched their management to kill waterhemp before the crop emerged. “We’re very aggressive with our pre-plant herbicide program. We scout and then apply another residual post to keep down emergence until the canopy forms. We also maintain crop rotation so we get corn chemicals every other year.”

Young advises using pre-emergence residual herbicides and tank mixes that are effective on problem weeds, even if you achieve a clean seedbed with tillage. “Tillage can’t be a replacement for a good, sound integrated resistance management program,” he says.

Mechanical control may be the only post option for some resistant weeds

Mechanical methods may be the only way to control multi-herbicide-resistant waterhemp or Palmer amaranth that emerges after soybeans. “Inter-row cultivation won’t save the day,” says Purdue weed scientist Bryan Young, “but it can help, especially if there are no effective herbicides available.”

In the mid-south, where resistant waterhemp and Palmer amaranth have become very difficult to control with herbicides, more growers have been forced to cultivate soybeans in season, says Jason Norsworthy, University of Arkansas weed scientist.

“If we look back in Arkansas seven or eight years, we couldn’t find a row cultivator,” he recalls. Today, about half the state’s 3.5 million soybean acres are cultivated in-season because of resistant pigweeds, and about a quarter are hand-hoed to remove weed escapes and prevent additions to the weed seed bank, he says.

The cost of hand weeding depends on weed densities. In Arkansas soybeans, Norsworthy estimates an average of $29/acre, but the price can go much higher. However, if growers are proactive and keep the weed seed bank down, hand-weeding can cost as little as $5 or $10/acre, which is less than the cost of tillage or herbicide application, he says.

Tillage for weed control: Pros and Cons

Pre-plant tillage

• More aggressive tillage is needed to destroy emerged weeds than to manage residue or prepare seedbed• May increase emergence of problematic weeds that come up after planting• Often used as a substitute for a diversified herbicide program that includes pre-emergence residual herbicides

At the 2009 annual conference of the Round Table for Responsible Soy (RTRS), Jason Clay held the closing address on behalf of the WWF. In it he held out the prospect of a hearty helping of extra profits for the soy industry bigwigs present: no-till agriculture, said Clay, would in future be rewarded with carbon credits: "The challenge now is to find mechanisms to reward producers who protect forest and soil by allowing them to sell carbon alongside their soy. This is a win-win-win situation. Forest and soil are protected, producers have an additional source of income and retailers and brands can now buy responsible soy as a way to reduce their carbon footprint. Preliminary calculations suggest that producers in forest areas can net more income selling carbon than soy. This fundamentally changes soy and makes it a new kind of commodity." [51]

Jason Clay is now a frequent and sought-after guest speaker at agribusiness industry conferences. He strokes the psyche of the managers and lends deeper meaning to their fight for market dominance: a partnership with the WWF signifies that your production is sustainable and helps nature and humanity.

In reality, no-till agriculture is highly controversial. Long-term US studies have proven that the method arouses false expectations: abstaining from tilling helps to keep only negligible amounts of carbon gases stored underground. [52] The storage that is accomplished is more than outweighed by the disadvantages of no-till cultivation. In the conventional tilling process the weeds are plowed under, becoming an integral part of the soil flora. In the till-less method, on the other hand, the big chemical herbicide guns are sent in to kill off the weeds. Before the GM soy is even planted, crop-duster pilots have already flown sorties with heavy doses of Roundup to "prepare" the fields: a reversion to the stone age of chemical-based agriculture. The constant shower of chemicals leads to the extinction of life in the soil, making it infertile.

To compensate for the loss of organically produced nutrients in the soil, more and more fertilizer is used, but that creates nitrous oxide. Nobel Prizewinning chemist Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute in Mainz has calculated that the use of fertilizer on soy fields releases three to five times more nitrous oxide (laughing gas) than the World Climate Council originally assumed -- a miscalculation with fatal consequences, because nitrous oxide warms the global climate three hundred times more than CO2 greenhouse gas.

Research by American agricultural scientist Prof. Miguel Altieri has shown that for every liter of biofuel produced, 1.27 liters of fossil fuel is burned: in the development of the fields and for the production and transportation of the soy oil. [53]Ergo, energy generation from plant sources exacerbates the problem with greenhouse gases instead of solving it!

It was time to bid farewell to our friend Jorge Rulli. He wanted to head back to Buenos Aires, where an opposition party had invited him to give evidence at a parliamentary hearing on the Argentine food crisis. He also needed to prepare his weekly radio commentary on government agricultural policy on the station Horizonte Sur. Jorge seemed tired as we said our goodbyes. Perhaps he would rather have been sitting in the sun in his garden of global vegetable delights, but he just couldn't give up the fight: "Although it's not normal that we old ones are fighting the battles of the younger generation."

There was no run on the political knowledge of his generation, said the aging warrior, because they're all too busy running after the "green gold". Some village festivals in Argentina no longer chose their beauty queen -- now it was a soy queen, the reina de la soja.The gold rush had put his countrymen in a feverish state. Not only that, added Jorge Rulli, the industry had donated millions of GM soy schnitzels to the poor to weaken the political firepower of the opposition: "Soy is packed with feminine hormones." Jorge winked with his one seeing eye as he said it, but I'm not entirely sure that his reference to political hormone warfare was just a parting joke.

ESTROGENS IN SOY

A number of studies have focused on the effects of the phytoestrogen genistein, found in soy foods, on males. In 1995, researchers demonstrated the effects of exposure in utero to genistein on the rat endocrine system.10 They injected groups of rats with various EMCs during gestation days 16-20 out of the total 23 days. Groups were injected with EMCs in the following manner: group 1 received 25000 micrograms of genistein; group 2 received 5000 micrograms of genistein; group 3 received 5 micrograms of DES; and group 4 received 50 micrograms of estradiol benzoate. A fifth group served as a control and received plain corn oil. The team looked at a long list of urogenital and endocrinological effects, including anogenital distance (AGD) or the length of tissue separating the anus and genitalia, volume of the sexually dimorphic nucleus in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus (SDN-POA) and the age of onset of puberty. Results of this study provided evidence that exposure to genistein in utero can influence markers known to be sensitive to estrogens. The findings also showed that the time of exposure during gestation, and the amount of the phytoestrogen ingested, are important factors in determining the extent of the pathology exhibited at birth and during the pubertal years. Although genistein did not adversely affect pregnancy, survival or delivery, exposure in early gestation caused a shortening in AGD and overall feminization of external male genitalia, even at low doses.

Another study demonstrated that genistein in soy products causes a decrease in SDN-POA volume in the hypothalamus, resulting in smaller differences in dimorphic behaviors (behaviors that differ according to sex) in the rats.11 Low-dose genistein also proved to delay puberty as the necessary hypothalamal-hypophyseal-gonadal axis surges were decreased, resulting in mixed signals for development of masculinization in young rats.

From these findings the researchers were able to conclude that genistein, at high and low levels, influences the hypothalamal-hypophyseal-gonadal axis-dependent aspects of development by modifying both “morphologic and neuroendocrine endpoints.” In other words, genistein caused changes in thinking and behavior patterns, as well as in reproductive development.

Further research by the same team demonstrated how serious these morphological changes can be to male subjects.12 This research showed conclusively that low levels of genistein decreased sexual dimorphism in rats, causing both males and females to act in the same manner during courtship, sexual arousal and during intercourse. In effect, male rats were expressing female sexual behaviors including lordosis, the typical female mating stance. In essence, exposure to genistein in the womb rendered the males non-receptive to typical female behaviors.

This research provides proof that phytoestrogens are strong enough to affect the endocrine system of the developing fetus and that they are not regulated or broken down by the mother’s hypothalamic responses.

Many papers written on the topic of organic estrogens and endocrine disrupters speak about a general feminization of male genitalia as the main visible pathology. This feminization includes undescent of the testes from the abdominal cavity as is seen in cryptorchidism, reduced number and quality of semen, and a dramatic decrease in penile size as is seen in hypospadias, a birth defect of the penis. These pathologies are becoming more and more frequent in number during the various stages of development, from fetal growth to post-puberty.13

During normal fetal development, the testicles descend as a result of a reduction in gubernacular turgidity and intra-abdominal pressure which pushes the testis into the scrotum.14 When estrogen levels are elevated during the time of testicular descent, the androgens that reduce gubernacular turgidity are not produced and secreted at the right levels for descent to take place. This means that the child is born and grows with either one or both of the testicles undescended. After birth the undescended testicle is either surgically lowered from the abdominal cavity into the scrotum or it remains in the abdomen where it stops functioning as a reproductive and endocrine gland. If both testicles remain undescended and they are not surgically lowered within the first few months of life, then the male is rendered impotent and will require removal of the testicles because of an increased cancer risk.

The farther north we went the bigger the soy fields got. There were no farmers left up there, just big corporate estate owners. Everywhere tree stumps jutted up from the ground. Until recently, the whole region had been forest; big soy companies had cleared it, among them the corporation La Moraleja, in which WWF founder Jose Martinez de Hoz has a stake. We could make out the forested heights of the Andes foothills in the distance. The soy wasteland stretched right up to where the mountains began. Whenever we drove at night we saw a forest burning somewhere. The slash-and-burn deforestation continued apace.

Pizarro

Driving through the outskirts of the small town Oran we came across a little aero club. A Cessna was just coming in for a landing. We waited until the pilot had peeled himself out of the tight cockpit and then I approached him. His Hungarian-born grandfather had been a fighter pilot on the side of the Germans in the 2nd World War, his father was a traffic report pilot -- and Julio Molnar was now a low-flyer over the soy fields, spraying the land with poison.

We wanted to shoot some aerial footage with him to document the advance of the soy front. He hesitated a bit and watched with concern as black storm clouds gathered on the horizon: "We might just make it." At wind velocities of about 120 km/h the little Cessna shuttered and jolted alarmingly, but the view from above in the evening light made up for the white-knuckle flight. The soy fields gleamed like gold. We flew over a few narrow corridors of forest that had been left unharmed: the paltry remains of an ecologically valuable forest that used to connect the dry savanna Chaco region in the east with the tropical rainforest in the west -- until three years ago.

"There used to be huge jaguar stocks here," the pilot shouted above the wind. They had now disappeared from the region. We flew over the village Pizarro, which was surrounded by soy fields. I decided I'd go the next morning and ask the people down there how they felt about the toxic low-flyers thundering overhead.

When we were safely back on the ground I plucked up my courage and asked the pilot what the many burn scars on his face were from. "It was an accident. We fly at just three meters above the ground at 200 kilometers an hour. That's very dangerous. A year ago I was flying an insecticide sortie at temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius. I opened the cabin door a crack so as not to suffocate. The poison seeped through and I lost my orientation. I didn't see the high-voltage power lines until it was too late, and I raced right into them. I managed to crawl out of the burning wreckage just in time. I was lucky; the accident investigators told me that 95 percent of pilots involved in similar accidents don't survive."

Julio Molnar knows how dangerous his freight is for the people below, and he would like to see the authorities enact no-fly zones in the air space near villages. But measures like that are hard to push through, especially up there in the wild north, far from the seat of the central government, especially when the law is on the side of the powerful anyway: "They often fill our tanks with what they call a 'cocktail', which is a mixture of a whole bunch of different poisons: herbicide, fungicide, insecticide. That's highly toxic; they're not actually allowed to, but most of them do it anyway, to cut costs."

During our trip along the scenic soy route we repeatedly heard complaints from local villagers: when the crop-dusters are at work many people suffer coughing attacks, they get skin rashes and experience problems with their vision. Julio Molnar slowly shook his head: "We don't fly directly over the villages, but the people are still subjected to some of it; it's unavoidable. A single gust of wind can carry the substance more than five kilometers away."

In the small aircraft hangar hall a wiry man stood waiting for our pilot -- it was his flight pupil. Julio Molnar introduced him as a doctor from the region. I'm not allowed to reveal his name, because what he had to tell us could cost him his job: "I'm seeing more and more villagers who are victims of the crop dusting. The most dangerous toxin, from a medical perspective, is Glyphosat, the main ingredient of Roundup. The hospitals around here are experiencing many stillbirths and babies born with severe deformities."

That changed, however, in 2010, when the US scientific journal 'Chemical Research in Toxicology' published the results of a groundbreaking study by Argentine molecular biologist Prof. Andres Carrasco. At his Institute of Cell Biology and Neurosciences the professor had conducted laboratory tests with Glyphosat on amphibians. Carrasco was so shocked by his own results that he decided to leave the safe confines of his scientific ivory tower and to make his discoveries available for use as ammunition against Monsanto. I met the feisty man, who was not afraid of a heated debate, at an anti-GMO conference in the Belgian city of Gent. He told me about the comprehensive study he had carried out on amphibians, which are very close to humans in their genomic structure. He had injected the test animals with a very low dose of Glyphosat. The result was spontaneous miscarriages and birth defects. The scientist was alarmed: "There is most definitely a correlation between the Roundup deployments in the countryside and the rising number of birth defects. I was very concerned, and wrote as much to our president. I know Mrs. Kirchner personally because we were at university together. She didn't even answer. The government is closing its eyes to this ticking time bomb and is conducting no systematic epidemiological surveys whatsoever. They're afraid it would mean the end of the entire soy model."

Carrasco found himself in the crosshairs of Monsanto and the US embassy in Buenos Aires. According to documents published by Wikileaks, they conducted undercover investigations against him, and sections of the Argentine government along with the national mainstream press began an orchestrated campaign to undermine Carrasco's reputation as a serious scientist. Monsanto proponents were up in arms because Carrasco shed doubt on Argentina's position as a ''green superpower"; in a conversation with me the former WWF President Dr. Hector Laurence even berated him as a "charlatan", motivated by ideological issues. Prof. Carrasco laughed when I told him that, but it was obvious that the attacks were really getting to him; it took an enormous amount of energy to defend himself against them. He said that a series of university colleagues had also stabbed him in the back. On the other hand -- his eyes lit up at this -- "reality" was stronger than lies. "The health crisis in the soy zones is such that even the GMO fanatics can no longer deny it."

Prof. Andres Carrasco's scientific theses have given encouragement and a voice to the growing movement of fumigated people all over Latin America. Carrasco also mentored the organization of rural Argentine doctors against fumigation. The worldwide protest movement against GMOs was deeply shocked to hear of the death of the courageous and dedicated scientist. Professor Andres Carrasco died on May 10th, 2014.

Prof. Andres Carrasco (RIP 2014)

Back to the soy highway -- route five, to be exact. The next day we arrived at a village called General Pizarro. A stop emphatically recommended by long-term FVSA/ WWF Argentina president Hector Laurence. There we would be able to marvel at one of the Argentine WWF's ''great successes" in nature conservation: the Pizarro National Park. According to Laurence, the WWF had saved this "high-value forest" from the greed of the provincial government looking to get in on the soy boom profits: it had "decommissioned" a 20,000-hectare nature reserve and sold it to the soy industry. This deal had sparked fierce protest by the inhabitants and attracted the attention of the conservationist heavy-hitters, first Greenpeace, later FVSA/WWF Argentina. The environmentalist organizations sued the provincial governor -- and won, if only by half.

As a result of the ruling the government had to buy back a portion of the former nature reserve from the corporations. A grand total of 4,000 hectares were all that was left of the 20,000 hectares originally under protection. The soy industry was permitted to keep the remaining majority share. On our flight over Pizarro National Park the day before it had looked tiny, a thin blue strip nestling up to the mountains in the west, with two green thighs branching off to the left and right. The filet cut in the middle had been torn out for the soy that now grew there: better than nothing! Says the WWF. We went in search of park management.

Pizarro was an oblong village with dusty dirt roads. It hadn't rained for months. The villagers said the deforestation was to blame for that; the climate had changed. Train service to the village had long since been discontinued. Black pigs and goats wandered along the old tracks. The park management had set up its office in the crumbling train station, a little room with a wooden table and a warped bookshelf filled with ring binders -- that was it.

Park ranger Soledad Rojas smiled at our astonished expressions: "Welcome to Argentina! We don't even have a vehicle for patrolling the national park. We have to take a bicycle." How strange! Hadn't the WWF made a big investment in this model project? The grin on Soledad's face grew even broader: "The WWF didn't join the protest movement until it was almost over. It was we, the residents of this community, who fought for our forest and won. The WWF jumped on the bandwagon and got money from an international organization for it." WWF representative Ulises Martinez Ortiz confirmed by email that the WWF had received 167,000 dollars from the Global Environmental Fund to develop a "management plan" for Pizarro. The money had been spent "appropriately", mainly on the fees of "consultants". Soledad Rojas was somewhat surprised: "We've seen none of that here."

The older villagers told us that WWF founder and dictatorship-era Minister of the Economy Jose Martinez de Hoz used to come to Pizzaro often to go jaguar hunting. The jaguars had outlived the hunt, but their fate had been sealed by the soy industry. Soledad Rojas and the other rangers had found no trace of a jaguar to date: "Apparently, they're extinct here now. The national park area is too small -- and its cut off. Jaguars migrate over vast areas, from the Chaco savanna in the east and the Yunga rainforest in the west. They can't do that anymore; they'd have to cross a few hundred kilometers of soy fields to do so."

We decided to spend another day in the environs of the wondrous national park and booked into the only hotel in the area: the Ruta 5 was a dismal roadside inn for truckers, technicians and migrant laborers who work seasonally on the soy fields. The long corridor was teeming with cockroaches and you had to step over three ancient, putrid-smelling dogs to reach your room. The air was black with mosquitoes; the temperature climbed to over 44 degrees Celsius; the television was broken; in the tiny swimming pool was not a drop of water, just an old discarded garden hose.

The next morning we visited small farmer Moises Rojas, who keeps a couple of pigs, has small maize fields between the trees and grows tomatoes in a small greenhouse to sell at market in the provincial capital Salta. His pigs live from the fruit of the algarroba (carob) tree -- he doesn't need any feed concentrate. "We're the real ecologists," he said, "we use the forest, but we don't destroy it." Moises had lost most of his land. "My land now belongs to a private company based in Buenos Aires. The state leased it to them, although Argentina recognizes customary law. The forest does belong to the state, but it is not allowed to simply expel those who live on and work it."The district government had given him substitute land, but it's only half the size of the old area and the soil quality is poor. Many farmers had even ended up selling off the replacement land allocated to them; it wasn't big enough to feed their animals. They were now living in the village, on social welfare.

Moises' neighbor Carlos Ordonez came by for a chat. For three years he had been waiting in vain for substitute land. The promised compensation money had not materialized either. In the meantime he had opened a little supermarket in the village just to survive. In his opinion the WWF had not treated the farmers well: "It cooperates with the big corporations and says: this forest is 'degraded' just because we (the locals) farm it. That's how the WWF supplies the government with the grounds for expelling us from the forest. What's so terrible about using the forest? The wood of the black algarroba tree is one of the hardest and most valuable in the world. It can provide a living if you always only just take a little. The soy industry has bulldozed millions of these trees down and burnt the wood -- and the WWF closes both eyes."

In the meantime a whole group of farmers had gathered around us. Farmer Carlos saw the fateful tale of little Pizzaro as an allegory of the evils of globalization: "Soy makes us poor and corporations like Cargill rich. The corporation cultivates soy here, refines the oil and sells it on the global market, and for that we lose our farmland. No worries, says Cargill, and imports wheat from one far-flung place on the planet or another so that we here in Pizarro have bread to eat. This is how the agriculture industry makes people totally dependent on them for food: they want total control. As Monsanto always says: 'We feed the world'. Before that company came here we could feed ourselves." Although half of northern Argentina's savanna forest has already been eliminated, another 5 million hectares have been given the green light for clearance.

I asked our host Moist's whether he had experienced any problems from the "agritoxins". He pointed up at the treetops: "Yes, once a plane flew right over our land spraying herbicide. I got a skin rash and the trees lost their leaves." Suddenly there was a commotion behind us. His wife, Francisca Sanchez de Rojas, had come out of the house and now vigorously joined the discussion: "You forgot to mention the baby I lost. I was in the ninth month of my pregnancy with a little girl. I had to have a Caesarean section -- the baby was born dead, with severe deformities. Several doctors examined it. They told me: that could be because of the chemicals; you live in a danger zone. Apparently the herbicide had damaged the genetic material. That's what happened to me."

Francisca Sanchez de Rojas in front of the soy desert

Biodiesel has triggered a new wave of structural violence in many nations on earth. Jean Ziegler, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to food, has called the production of fuel crops on farmland "A crime against humanity". Plant-based renewable energies produce hunger, poverty and death; and yet the WWF continues to promote them.

In May 2010 WWF biomass expert Martina Fleckenstein made the industry a tempting offer. At the World Biofuels conference, a global industry gathering held in Seville, Spain, she said that, in the WWF's view, the area devoted to the production of sustainable biomass could be extended worldwide to 450 million hectares -- an area the size of the entire European Union. [54] If this vision were to become reality it would mean that a third of all agricultural land on earth would be devoted to the cultivation of biofuel plants -- a nightmare scenario for human beings and a sure way of exacerbating hunger in the world. Even long-time allies of the WWF have begun to turn their backs on biofuels. In December 2013 senior management at food giants Unilever and Nestle wrote a letter to the European Union Energy Commissioner. In it they demanded a drastic reduction in the share of food crops used for the production of biofuel. Only then could hunger and climate change be stopped. Just one percent more biofuel, they wrote in their joint appeal, "would divert enough food for 34 million people". [55]

The WWF is becoming increasingly isolated as a biofuel industry lobby organization; it appears to be deaf to the rising critical clamor. Or perhaps not ... I've been told that since the original German publication of this book in the summer of 2012 the public debate it triggered has also led to discussions at management level within the WWF, and possibly even to small changes in policy. On November 28, 2013 WWF Germany published a brochure entitled: 'Searching for sustainability'. In its analysis of the various sustainability certification models for biofuels even the certificates co-created by the WWF itself get a bad rap: "The analysis shows that some important issues are poorly represented in the approved standards, including the implementation of social and environmental management systems on the corporate level, handling of invasive species, limitation of the use of hazardous chemicals, waste and water management, restoration of riparian areas and segregation of supply chains in order to offer a non-GMO option. Many standards do not adequately address transparency in public reporting, internal system governance and audit scope and intensity." [56]

In her presentation of the study, Imke Lubbeke, WWF Senior Renewable Energy Policy Officer in Brussels, calls for the European Commission to improve the standards for renewable energies and comes to the staggering conclusion that: "Poisoned water and polluted soil is too high a price to pay for a full petrol tank." A small ray of reason is better than none at all. At least the WWF now wants to toughen the criteria for receiving "green" certification. But a decisive jump off the biofuel bandwagon is still nowhere in sight.

What shouldn't be true can't be true. When I told a WWF staffer I've known for some time that, at an RTRS meeting, the WWF had voted with Monsanto in favor of a certification standard for "responsible" GM soy, he accused me of being a "conspiracy nut". Collaboration between the WWF and Monsanto was impossible, not least because in August 2004 the WWF had joined other environmentalist groups as a signatory to the Basel Criteria for Responsible Soy Production, a series of guidelines that categorically rejects genetic engineering. But the panda also has two faces when it comes to GMOs.

I flew to Geneva to interview business consultant Jochen Koester. In a telephone conversation beforehand he had already made the cryptic comment: "I do feel shortchanged by the WWF in the genetic engineering department." Now I stood outside his company TraceConsult with its magnificent view of Lake Geneva. Although he's a big name business consultant for the soy industry, Koester was adamant that doing business with GM soy was out of the question for him on "ethical" grounds. Genetically modified soy was, he said, "massively damaging for human beings" and it was "incomprehensible" to him that the WWF hadn't prevented the two biggest GM giants in the world from being allowed to join the gathering around the Round Table for Responsible Soy: Monsanto from the USA and Syngenta from Switzerland: "The result will be that, in the future, 80 to 90 percent of soy certified as 'sustainable' will come from genetically modified seed." No one could be sure, he said, what long-term health risks GMOs carried. "It'll take two to three generations before we know the consequences, but Monsanto can't wait that long. The corporation has invested billions in researching genetic engineering, and now they're hell bent on using it, come what may." That was "somehow understandable" the entrepreneur said. But the fact that the WWF, a "luxury brand among the nature conservancy organizations", had gotten into bed with Monsanto, had "shocked" him. He knew whereof he spoke, because he himself had worked on the RTRS: "When it first got going I was convinced that GM soy would never ever get a sustainability certificate."

In March 2005 the very first gathering of the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) was held at a luxury hotel in the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguacu. Chairwoman of the meeting was Yolanda Kakabadse, former Minister of the Environment in Ecuador, elected President of WWF International in 2010. All the big soy industry players where there, among them the four corporations that control the global soy market: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus. Also seated at the table were those who finance the green gold trade: Rabobank from the Netherlands and HSBC Bank. Both financial institutions hold large blocks of shares in the grain corporations.

Major food multinational Unilever is a founding member of the Round Table, as are industrial seed and pesticide producers DuPont, Pioneer and Bayer. Joining them are newcomers to the biomass business: the conventional oil companies, including Shell. With the participation of the WWF the RTRS has succeeded in bringing together all stakeholders in the soy production and distribution chain to collaborate on setting an international standard for "sustainable" soy.

In the beginning the companies were afraid that the WWF might call for too many costly environmental restrictions, but it turned out they needn't have worried: experts regard the RTRS-negotiated standards as soft-boiled and non-committal. They allow producers to continue to chop down forests and unleash chemical warfare on the arable land. The guidelines provide protection from the advance of the soy army for only a few "high-value primary forests". But the real clincher of the negotiations, from the industry perspective, was whether or not the WWF would bite the GMO bullet.

The Pact

Jochen Koester had been a part of the Round Table working group on "principles". "At one of the first meetings someone brought up the subject of GMOs. A representative of the Executive Committee immediately intervened and said: 'You're not allowed to discuss that here'. We were somewhat taken aback by this censorship. The gag order remained in place, but the next day at least a reason for it was given: the RTRS was 'technology neutral' and would not take a position on genetic engineering."

"Technology neutrality" was the inroad: in 2009, much to the surprise of many, the RTRS admitted two new active members to its ranks -- Monsanto and Syngenta, the two biggest genetic engineering companies in the world. As soon as the GMO duo had sat down at the Round Table the process of defining the standards for sustainable soy gained momentum, and Jochen Koester's fears became reality: in 2010 the RTRS adopted the guidelines for "responsible soy" -- with the affirmative votes of the WWF and Monsanto.

The statement of the association itself couldn't be more straightforward: "RTRS is a voluntary certification program developed by The Round Table on Responsible Soy Association. It is applicable to all kinds of soybeans, including conventionally grown, organic, and genetically modified. It has been designed to be used for all scales of soy production and all the countries where soy is produced." [57]

For the GMO corporations the ratification of these guidelines was a victory from start to finish: a method of production proven risky to humankind and nature had been anointed "sustainable" with the stamp of the trusted panda.

Monsanto could now encroach on the rainforest for its soy production in a certified sustainable manner. Previously, soy cultivation in the hot, humid climate of the Amazon River basin had been a losing proposition: the soy plants were attacked and destroyed by fungi, insects and competing plant life. But since receiving the expedient new certification Monsanto has begun flooding the market with GM soy varieties engineered to tolerate the tropical rainforest climate. It's the shape of things to come: "sustainable" rainforest destruction. With the RTRS certificate it helped to develop, the WWF has bestowed a princely gift on the pioneers of genetic engineering.

Jochen Koester is still baffled: "How could they bring a company like Monsanto on board, a corporation that in 2009 was awarded a prize for being the company with the world's least ethical trading practices?" I played devil's advocate and allowed that the WWF at least had good intentions in a dialogue with Monsanto management aimed at improving the business practices of the corporation. Jochen Koester had to laugh: "You don't still believe in Santa Claus do you? Embracing a corporation won't make it better."

The act of getting into bed with Monsanto, metaphorically speaking, shattered a taboo in the environmentalist movement. The betrayal of fundamental principles thus committed by the WWF triggered a wave of criticism. In a letter dated February 9th 2011, for example, the German League for Nature, Animal Protection and Environment (Deutscher Naturschutzring -- DNR) remonstrated with WWF management: "The RTRS is providing artificial life support for an agricultural system that has long since proved a failure ... When the WWF says that GM soy production is perfectly fine, it helps the corporations and unfortunately it's also a stab in the back to many environmental organizations who have spent years raising the alarm about the environmental and health risks of GM soy."[58]

Many European WWF members also can't quite see what supporting Monsanto has to do with nature conservancy. They explain it by asserting that corporate-friendly Americans at WWF International had quietly taken control of leadership, although they represented only a "marginal opinion". I wrote Jason Clay to request an interview. The Vice President of WWF USA and Chairmen of the international WWF steering committee Market Transformation had, after all, personally orchestrated the big deals with major agribusiness players, including Monsanto. I wanted him to tell me why the WWF went in for such asymmetrical partnerships -- and what it gained by them. Jason Clay gave me a friendly reply, agreeing to an interview based on my written questions, submitted beforehand. We made an appointment to meet at his Washington, D.C. office.

Shortly before we were due to meet, Clay's press secretary cancelled: unfortunately Jason Clay would have to distance himself from the interview because WWF Germany had "some questions and concerns about your TV special. .. We are a partnership organization and we need to defer to the German office." I called WWF Germany spokesman Jam Ehlers. He was in high spirits, thinking he had scored a little victory: "I can understand that the cancellation is annoying for you, but it's good for us." I asked why the German office had applied so much pressure. "Because if Jason Clay were to get too expansive we could lose sponsors and contributors."

Many WWF members still believe that sustainability certification for GM soy was just some sort of negotiation slip-up: their "own people" had allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by Monsanto. Apparently that kind of thing does happen, but subsequent research would prove that this attempt at an explanation was not founded in reality.

Jason Clay

Monsanto, Cargill, Unilever and Syngenta are the joint founders of a powerful international lobbyist association, the Food & Agriculture Trade Policy Council. Its mission is to spread the gospel of GMOs throughout the world. The council propagates a new "green revolution" that would use genetic engineering to overcome famine on earth. The WWF is the only NGO represented in this lobbyist organization -- by Jason Clay.

In the summer of 2010, at a Global Harvest Initiative conference in Washington D.C., spokespeople for Monsanto and DuPont took to the stage, beating the drum for the intensive farming of the future. Jason Clay of the WWF was next up to the podium. In his speech he professed unambiguous faith in genetic engineering: "We need to freeze the footprint of agriculture. We think there are 7 or 8 things -- and you can disagree with that, and that s great, lets get the discussion started -- that we need to work on to do that. One is genetics. We have got to produce more with less. We've got to focus not just on temperate crops, and not just on annual crops, but on tropical crops, on 'orphan' crops, on crops that produce more calories per input, per hectare, with fewer impacts." [59]

As an example of the potential of genetic modification Jason Clay referred to a study financed by mega grain wholesaler Cargill. It concluded: with genetic engineering the production of palm oil could be doubled. And: the food supply problems of the world's poorest countries could -- according to Jason Clay -- only be solved with the help of GMOs, which would enable each tree to deliver a harvest of three times the conventional amount of mangos, cacao beans or bananas. "We need to get our priorities right: We need to start focusing on the food production: Where it's needed, what's needed, and how to move forward. It takes 15 years at least (and maybe longer as we go along), to bring a genetically engineered product to market. If we don't start today, we're already at 2025. The clock is ticking, we need to get moving." [60]

Dr. Jason Clay

This message was no doubt music to the ears of Monsanto boss Hugh Grant, as it clearly echoed his mantra: "We feed the Dr. Jason Clay world". For Grant, the alliance with the WWF has proved a strategic success. For the first time, an independent, influential civil society entity had said an unreserved "yes" to genetic engineering -- no "ifs" or "buts."

Jason Clay, who habitually opens his lectures by mentioning that he grew up on a small farm in Missouri, knows how to modulate the key. When addressing an audience of environmentalists or intellectuals instead of big business representatives he pitches his talk accordingly: as an overture he attacks the corporations, criticizing their destructive ecological footprint, a crescendo that culminates in the cathartic trumpet call: when the WWF "embraces" the global market players, the evils of the world vanish.

In his July 2010 talk at the TED Global Conference in Edinburgh, Jason Clay even went as far as saying that he would enter partnership agreements with the 100 most important corporations on the planet. According to Clay's data these companies control the extraction, production and the global trade in the world's 15 most significant commodities: "We've got to take what we've learned in private, voluntary standards, of what the best producers in the world are doing, and use that to inform government regulation, so we can shift the entire performance curve. We can't just identify the best, we've got to move the rest." [61]

On the Cargill website I found a reference to the partnership agreement with the WWF, the spirit and purpose of which is described as follows: "Cargill is working with the WWF to undertake an assessment of its palm oil suppliers in Indonesia as part of its continuous commitment to sustainable palm oil production." They offer their own homespun definition of sustainability as the gold standard in this undertaking: "We already have responsible palm production policies on our own plantations, and we want to play our part by working with the industry and the Indonesian government to encourage the adoption of sustainable production practices. The collaboration is based on the responsible palm oil production we practice on our own plantations."

-- Panda Leaks: The Dark Side of the WWF, by Wilfried Huismann

Blackwater

In Washington D.C. I came into contact with a WWF department head. He knew that headquarters had decided I was persona non grata, but he didn't care. Still, I'd rather not mention his name, because he didn't want to be seen within the organization as "disloyal". A conservationist of many years' standing, he no longer felt at home at the WWF. The reins were now in the hands of marketing experts and managers who had come to the WWF from industry: "The WWF has lost its principles." In his view, the soy deal with Monsanto represented the lowest ebb in the moral decline of the WWF; for this reason he was prepared to let me in on a juicy detail about the affair with Monsanto.

"In the summer of 2010 the CEO of Monsanto, Hugh Grant, paid a top-secret visit to WWF USA headquarters in Washington D.C." My informant and most other members of WWF management had not been privy to what was being negotiated behind closed doors. In parting, the WWF man handed me a copy of an article from the political news weekly 'The Nation': "So you'll understand why I'm afraid of Jason's new friends." Back at the hotel I read the article. Although I was well aware that Monsanto was no cheery charity shop, I was still shocked at the content of journalist Jeremy Scahill's expose. His research revealed that in 2008 Monsanto had hired the infamous private security company Blackwater to infiltrate groups opposing genetic engineering. Typically, the US firm Blackwater would lease mercenary units to foreign governments for deployment in international and civil wars. Blackwater also carried out special operations for the US Army and the CIA when it was desired that the hand of the US Government remain invisible -- especially those involving targeted killings in the name of the "war on terror".

For the Monsanto contract Blackwater deployed its subsidiary Total Intelligence Solutions. According to 'The Nation: in January 2008 TIS boss Cofer Black met up in Zurich with Monsanto's head of security Kevin Wilson. At that meeting Blackwater advised Monsanto to create its own intelligence department. This private corporate secret service agency should then plant its agents in anti-GMO groups and media to subvert them from within. [62] Greetings from Big Brother.

The European WWF organizations fear a mass membership exodus if it becomes known how close the embrace between their organization and Monsanto has become. In response to the original German publication of this book in 2012 WWF Germany set up a 'fact check" website as a forum for concerned members and donors. There the organization was at first disingenuous in the matter of its controversial partner, claiming: "The WWF does not cooperate with Monsanto." Furthermore, they claimed to have never received money from the corporation. Only a few days later, however, the WWF had to retract the claim and admit that WWF USA had, in fact, accepted donations from Monsanto between 1985 and 1992 -- to the tune of 103,000 dollars. [63]

Even confirmed WWF supporters are no longer convinced by the organization's attempts at self-defense. In an entry from June 28th 2011, a contributor to the WWF Germany online forum summed up his subjective assessment: "So the impression remains ... that you allow yourselves to be instrumentalized by industry, indeed by the most mafia-like, problematical industry of our times, after weapons and oil."

The response from WWF management from the same day reads like a confession: "The fact that we engage in exchanges with certain companies doesn't mean that we have any fondness for these companies at all. Admittedly: sometimes it's incredibly difficult to overcome our own reticence ... but we have only one goal: to prompt companies like Monsanto to change their behavior. That may sound naive to you, but that's how we think!"

In an internal document from February 17th 2009, management at WWF International had already looked at possible ways of subverting the pending criticism of its alliance with Monsanto. The paper, destined for the eyes of WWF functionaries only, makes clear that the organization was seeking to reposition itself in the public arena and to renege on previously ratified resolutions: "WWF needs to develop an updated position on GMOs that, among other things, addresses circumstances where GM production is already widespread." [64]

In regard to stemming opposition within the rank and file, it reads: "WWF needs to proactively manage the potential risk to its reputation and membership base due to perceptions that it is promoting GM companies or that the RTRS is a pro-GM process." The paper proposes an immediate intervention: "WWF Switzerland will explore options for the registered address of the RTRS to be changed." This was relevant because, to date, the Round Table for Responsible Soy, at which Monsanto and the WWF sit side-by-side, had been headquartered at Hohlstrasse 110 in Zurich; WWF Switzerland happened to share the same address. Would such cosmetic maneuvers really placate their own membership base?

I discovered another document along the way: the program from a WWF International training course for corporate managers. The content makes amply clear that the WWF cooperation with Monsanto is not an exclusively American affair. Entitled: 'Step forward to be a ONE PLANET LEADER -- the applied sustainability programme for business leaders and executives', the WWF executive training course would, among other things, teach managers how to convert their companies to "sustainable business models", with no losses to the bottom line. On the contrary: the established trend in the age of climate change was that a green image sent profits skyrocketing.

Participants paid the handsome fee of almost 13,000 dollars for the course, which was held over several days in idyllic Swiss Ittingen, in the exclusive ambiance of a former monastery. Seminar guests were fed only "organically farmed vegetables" -- perhaps the ultimate punishment for some of the executives on the course. The list of participants reveals that many global corporations have already sent their managers to the WWF Swiss greenwashing academy: ABN Amro, Canon, Coca-Cola, Dow, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, okia, Shell and -- Monsanto.

In Brussels I asked Nina Holland of the European Corporate Observatory about this. The watchdog organization she works for focuses on big corporations predisposed to lobbyism, so the WWF was also on Nina Holland's radar. The WWF European Policy Office in Brussels is located on the upscale Avenue de Tervurenlaan, only about 100 meters away from the Europe representation of Monsanto.

According to Nina Holland the same 30 WWF staffers knocking on doors in Brussels have direct access to EU Commissioners and to the powerful General Directors for Agriculture, Environment and Transport. They were welcome guests with a reputation for being "constructive". The WWF is invariably invited to conferences and seminars on climate policy, energy, water and also transportation, often as the only environmental organization among industrialists. Many of these high-level meetings are private events, planned and financed by industry associations or individual corporations. The WWF is also the only nature conservancy organization to enjoy membership in the Friends of Europe, one of the most influential think tanks in Brussels.

Nina Holland assessed the WWF as a lobbying force to be reckoned with in the Brussels corridors of power. Since 2004 she had observed the organization promoting plant-based fuels, pushing in particular for the approval of fuel from GM soy: "The corporations took no interest in the Basel Criteria -- a sustainability standard that expressly forbade genetic engineering. The WWF was also a signatory to the Basel Criteria. But the ink on its signature had barely dried when it got together with the industry to hatch an alternative proposal, the Round Table for Responsible Soy. The goal, it seems to me, and from the very beginning, was to gain entry for GM soy to the European renewable energies market. The people from the Brussels WWF office met with the relevant EU officials and lobbied them for EU accreditation of the private RTRS certification system."

Together we reviewed the staff list of the WWF European Policy office in Brussels. Not an American among them; the entire staff came from European WWF organizations. Heading the WWF ED crew was Imke Lubbeke from WWF Germany. She is Senior European Policy Officer for Bioenergy. For Nina Holland this was clear evidence that European WWF representatives don't always tell their members the truth: "The Americans are not major stakeholders in the RTRS certification for soy. It was a project for Europe from the very start. Without the WWF, Monsanto would never have been able to gain entry to Europe so quickly and easily. And I'm afraid that's only the first step. In two years at the latest we'll be hearing: if Monsanto plants can be farmed responsibly and sustainably in Latin America, then why not in Europe?"

On July 19th 2011, the European Union ruled to grant accreditation to the RTRS certification seal. That put biodiesel from GM soy in the category of "renewable energy from sustainable agriculture". Just a short time later the first shipload of RTRS soy arrived in Rotterdam. It came from the company Amaggi, the biggest soy producer in Brazil and a partner of the WWF at the Round Table for Responsible Soy.

Until 2007 one of the owners of the Grupo Amaggi, Blairo Maggi, was governor of the soy province Mato Grosso and has the dubious reputation of being Brazil's biggest deforester. 40 percent of all forest clearance in Brazil can be attributed to his company. A fact that doesn't bother Maggi in the least: "That 40 percent means nothing at all to me. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty. We still have an area of virgin forest bigger than Europe, so there's nothing to be worried about." [65]

Eating Ice Cream for the Rainforest

Jason Clay personifies like no other WWF policy for the 21st century. He advocates cozying up to big business far more openly and radically than his Old World colleagues. Who is this Jason Clay, who wants to link arms with Monsanto to save the planet? What motivates him and what does he really believe?

Old friends and associates recall that in the late 1970s and 1980s he was an enthusiastic young anthropologist working with the indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival. He was in charge of editing the Cultural Survival Quarterly, an important and influential journal that gave support to indigenous peoples fighting for their autonomy. Clay was not a field anthropologist; he never spent much time in the field with indigenous peoples, but he spoke eloquently in defense of their rights, invariably backing up his talks with a briefcase full of statistics. In 1988, Clay wrote: "The people that have used tropical forests for centuries without destroying them are now, in turn, being destroyed ... Western attitudes, which stress the conquering of nature, have had disastrous consequences ... " [66]

Today, Clay is a different person altogether. Once thin as a rail, he has put on considerable weight and has adopted the manner and inflection of the multinational managers he now calls his partners. He is a powerful figure within WWF International, and while there is opposition to his views and approach within his own organization, there are few who would challenge him openly. I wanted to know how the great WWF strategist ticked, but as I'd been forbidden from speaking with him, I had to make a detour to Colorado to find out.

Mac Chapin

Anthropologist Mac Chapin makes his home these days at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, just north of the town of Boulder. He had worked closely with Jason Clay at Cultural Survival from 1987 through 1993: "During the first years, Jason was a very responsible professional. He was adept at putting together the issues of the Quarterly -- a daunting task that involved eliciting articles from knowledgeable scholars who were working with endangered indigenous peoples around the world, all done on a tight schedule. Yet as time passed, he grew bored with the journal and set off in a new direction: the marketing of rainforest products. In 1989, he founded Cultural Survival Enterprises, which was set up to bring indigenous peoples into the international market. One of the most visible results of this was the development of Rainforest Crunch, a caramel and nut candy that was also turned into a line of ice cream sold by the popular Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream brand. The nuts -- mainly cashews and Brazil nuts -- were supposedly hand-harvested by indigenous peoples living in the rainforest." Chapin laughed. "Virtually none of the ingredients were actually produced by indigenous peoples." The sugar came from industrial plantations and the milk came from cows, and both were produced on land that was decidedly not covered with rainforest. Beyond this, the aluminum packaging for Rainforest Crunch candy was hardly a "sustainable" product. "It was all a bluff, but it worked. Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch was a tremendous success." The message on the package was: "Rainforest Crunch shows us that the rainforest is more profitable when its nuts, fruits, and medicinal plants are traditionally cultivated and harvested than when its trees are felled for a quick profit."

A few years after the launch of Jason Clay's marketing idea inquisitive journalists from The Boston Globe uncovered the truth: Five percent of the nuts at most came from a cooperative in the rainforest; Ben & Jerry's bought the bulk of their nuts wholesale from non-indigenous middlemen. Not only that: in order to get what they needed, it turned out that the company could not count on indigenous producers, for the quality of nut they produced was uneven and they could not supply enough of them. In the end, the nut-gatherers were not Indios but rather mestizo farmers in non-indigenous regions, and most of the nuts came from areas that were not rainforest. [67]

In the face of this PR disaster, Ben & Jerry's pulled the emergency brake and in 1994 removed the flavor from their inventory. It had all been a success nonetheless, claimed the company, because Rainforest Crunch had at least "created demand for rainforest products".

"This was hardly a success," says Chapin. Instead of empowering indigenous peoples, it was undercutting them. Rainforest Crunch would be widely remembered as a marketing fraud. Within the WWF, however, it became a model for future campaigns that coax money out of donors' pockets while simultaneously easing their conscience. Do you want to save the African savannah? Just chug down some Krombacher beer or jet around the world with LTU. Are you serious about saving the polar bear from extinction? Just drink more Coca-Cola. One has to ask: Is the WWF really concerned about the climate or just with the cash?

Chapin has followed the metamorphosis of his former colleague with apprehension. "Jason found marketing sexy, and it gave him an opportunity to deal with large companies. When he went to work with WWF in the mid-1990s, he rapidly rose to the top. He fit the bill, for WWF and the other large conservation organizations, all of them growing rapidly in size, were anxious to bring in more money, and marketing on the scale Jason promoted was in line with this goal. He is a smooth power broker and very ambitious, and he intimidates many of the traditional conservationists in the organization."

For years, Chapin and his colleagues worked closely with WWF personnel, trying to bring them together with indigenous groups to forge alliances. In his experience, conservationists working in the field often do a good job; they deal evenly and respectfully with the people living in the forests they want to protect. Yet the main office has a different approach: they are after money, and that is where the conflict is. I read him Jason Clay's statement about "embracing" the 100 biggest corporations in the world to "improve" them. Chapin cracked a smile: "These large corporations are very powerful. They are like sharks and WWF is like a pilot fish that swims alongside, picking up scraps left by the predator. The WWF pilot fish is simply pretending to direct the corporate shark in this direction or that. No small organization like WWF is going to influence a multinational company like Chevron-Texaco or Monsanto. All the companies are looking for is a green fig leaf, and that is what WWF supplies -- for money, of course."

Chapin is at peace living in the Rockies. He is semi-retired, an adjunct professor at the nearby University of Colorado, and he continues working with indigenous peoples in the field. Yet he is not sanguine about the prospects of success. "There are simply too many forces moving against indigenous peoples these days. Petroleum companies began drilling in tropical rainforests on a large scale in the 1980s; mining operations have arrived, and now rainforest is being cleared for oil palm, sugar cane, and soy for the production of biofuels. Forest is being cleared at an ever-accelerating rate, and there is seemingly no way to stop it. Now that we have the large conservation organizations working closely with corporations that include oil companies such as Chevron-Texaco and Mobile, they have come to work against the interests of indigenous peoples. This is a very alarming trend."

If I wanted to understand the WWF, said Chapin, I should follow the money. The WWF, along with the other big nature advocacy groups such as Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, has become financially dependent on Big Industry. "It is ironic that the large conservation organizations are working hand-in-glove with companies that are destroying the ecosystems that they claim to be protecting. On the other side of the equation, there is little evidence that WWFs approach will help indigenous peoples in their struggles to save the rainforest. In the late 1980s the indigenous groups of the Amazon Basin proposed an alliance with the conservationists, and WWF produced a position paper that spoke of working together. But nothing came of it."

Chapin is an affable man who generally avoids conflict. Yet in 2004 he drew the ire of the conservationists by publishing a polemic piece titled "A Challenge to Conservationists" in World Watch Magazine. In this article, he made it public that the Ford Foundation, which has over the years funded many WWF programs, was conducting a critical evaluation of relations between indigenous peoples and the large conservation organizations. "A number of indigenous organizations had complained to Ford that the conservationists were being abusive," says Chapin. "Ford hired two consultants who were looking into the matter, and what they were finding was alarming."

According to Chapin, in most cases the conservationists were riding roughshod over the peoples living in rainforest areas they claimed to be protecting. Despite claiming that they were partnering with indigenous peoples, they were instead partnering with the corporations that were displacing the indigenous peoples. WWF and the other conservation groups were silent on their arrangements with the companies. They said they were "apolitical" and did not on principle take sides in conflicts; yet this was exactly what they were doing. The Ford Foundation put a gag order on the evaluation. Leading the charge was Yolanda Kakabadse, then-President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Since January 2010 she has been President of WWF International.

Chapin fears that the tropical ecosystems of much of Latin America, the homes of many vulnerable indigenous peoples, will be destroyed within the coming decades. This is happening in the Amazon Basin. Extractive corporations from all over the world "are running amok, and the conservationists find themselves hog-tied with the financial arrangements they have with the corporations. The last thing they want to do is partner with indigenous peoples. In this context, the large conservation organizations have become henchmen of the corporations; and with personnel like Jason Clay, they are adopting their values."

There was still a place in his heart for the WWF: "I had a lot of freedom in carrying out my projects. It's not all bad, what the WWF does!"

John sat across from me in a little cafe in Brussels. John is not his real name, but he'd like to remain anonymous. He's afraid of the long arm of the WWF should he decide to apply for a job with another NGO. John had been responsible for international WWF projects but had since left the organization: "My problem with the WWF is its dialogue policy, which has been adopted worldwide. They disappear behind closed doors to negotiate with the powerful and they think they'll make the world a better place that way. Unfortunately I don't know of a single example where that has worked. The only thing that has ever brought success is when people unite in resistance and together make something happen. Just think of Germany: you don't have dialogue to thank for the nuclear power phase-out; it's down to the anti-nuclear movement that persevered for decades. To win in a conflict you have to persevere. The WWF isn't capable of confrontation; it's enough to satisfy senior members when the WWF gets more press than Greenpeace."

John had belonged to the enthusiastic midsection of the WWF structure; in his opinion, many round tables with industry partners are a total sham that do nothing for nature. The round table for dams had been the last straw for John: "The WWF attitude is: we can't stop them building mega-dams in the rainforests of Africa and Latin America anyway, so we'll just concentrate on 'better practice' instead, in other words: you can't prevent something bad, only make it better."

I argued that hydraulic power was, at least, better than cultivating crops for fuel, because it's cleaner and whole forests aren't cleared to produce it. John rejected this argument: "Palm oil plantations and soy monoculture are situated on the peripheries of the rainforests, but the dams are built bang in the middle of the world's most valuable rainforests. They destroy the rainforest starting right from the heart of it. 80 dams are now in planning for along the Amazon alone. To build the dams, huge swaths are cut through the forests for roads and for the power lines above. Thousands of migrant workers come from other parts of the country to work on the building site and then they burn down the forest so they can settle and farm there. The Indios call them 'carnivores', and with them comes alcohol, degradation and the swift trade in prostitution. Although the WWF knows that the giant dams destroy both nature and indigenous cultures it has reconciled itself to their proliferation."

John had fought in vain against the WWF's change of course: "The WWF, along with other big NGOs, gives climate change priority over everything else, which blinds them to the new problems that are actually created by the so-called 'renewable industries'. What's even worse is the fact that the WWF has actually helped industry lower the ecological standards for dam construction." The old standards, which had been developed jointly by the World Commission on Dams and the World Bank, were a solid set of environmental regulations, but far too stringent for the taste of the big property developers.

So the International Hydropower Association (IHA) had initiated a round table where partners would gather for a 'dialogue' that would bring forth new, lower standards. "The WWF accepted the offer and sat down together with industry at the negotiation table. The result was presented in the summer of 2011, and it was clearly a change for the worse. The standards are not binding; compliance with them is dependent on the good will of the companies involved."

I found the result of the dialogue on the International Hydropower Association (IHA) website: the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol. Signatories to the protocol include major energy companies, as well as banks and government agencies, and two lone non-profits: the WWF and the US organization Nature Conservancy. The protocol consists of non-binding recommendations that had been reached "by consensus". A typical example of the elastic language used: "Criteria or principles for analysis of alternatives might include, by way of example, siting on tributary stream rather than mainstream rivers; avoidance of high value biodiversity areas; avoidance of resettlement." [68]

According to my contact John, on this occasion the WWF had bestowed the use of its good name upon industry without any tangible quid pro quo: "It's a typical negotiation trap. You spend months trying to come up with the right phrasing and then sign up to a protocol that seems promising, but actually has no significance in practice. Suddenly you find yourself sitting in the same boat with industry. The chief negotiators of NGOs often experience that as recognition of a sort -- it's a psychological phenomenon. Then an external voice comes along and criticizes the agreement, which they take as a personal attack, having participated in the deal. So then they defend it as an important step forward."

John was convinced that in signing up to this protocol, the WWF had bowed out of the fight against the mega-dams for good: "In practice, no one pays any attention to the agreed standards. In my opinion, the dialogue strategy of the WWF is helping to destroy the natural environment, because the companies now have free rein to embark on a huge business venture -- there are 1,500 dams in planning worldwide. The 'green economy' will accelerate the destruction the planet."

The Southern Hemisphere, especially Africa, provides a tempting prospect of mega-profits from hydropower. The Grand Inga Dam being planned for the Democratic Republic of Congo will be the world's largest. Speaking of these developments over coffee in the old town of Brussels John suddenly seemed tired and discouraged. Was he? "It has become harder to fight. Globalization makes you helpless. You often don't know your enemy anymore, and the local indigenous people are left to cope alone; most of us in the West have turned our backs on the culture of resistance. Even within the WWF I was considered a radical because of my views."

As radical as blockbuster film director James Cameron, who in 2010, together with Bill Clinton, headed out to Brazil to offer support to the Indios in their fight against the mega hydroelectric dam complex Belo Monte. 20,000 indigenous people had been earmarked for resettlement because of the project, and a further 20,000 would be forced out because the dam would destroy their fish reserves -- 'Avatar' on earth. John recalled Cameron's encounter with the Indios: "He felt like he was in a scene from his own film, except that the blue-skinned Na'vi natives of his fictional Pandora were now a real, red-skinned people called Kayapo. Like the Na'vi they fought with bow and arrow against an enemy fully equipped with high-tech gear."

In Cameron's film the Na'vi are victorious; the indigenous people of Brazil's Xingu River basin, on the other hand, appear to have lost the fight. Disregarding the protests, in August 2011, the Brazilian government issued a building permit. One of the tribal chiefs wept when the decision was made public; others were not about to give up the fight: "They were very determined, and told me that when the bulldozers came they would reach for their weapons and there would be war. I think they still have no idea of what's actually coming their way."

WWF Superpower

WWF studies show that currently about 30 percent of the earth's surface is still covered by more or less untouched natural environments, in which mainly indigenous peoples live. It appears the WWF has entered into discreet dealings with the giants of the energy and agricultural sectors, with the aim of saving some of these remaining bio-topes. The organization finds itself in a dilemma: it can't stop the forward march of intensive plantation farming in Africa, Asia and Latin America, yet urges that at least 10 percent of the planet's surface area remain untouched under stringent protection measures. Some WWF staffers have even recently begun speaking of 20 percent. Industrial players on the other hand, choose to interpret the WWF demands to suit themselves: if just 10 percent has to be saved, that means the rest of all natural environments are fair game for the last raid of the energy and agriculture companies. In the Southern Hemisphere there are still huge forest areas and savannas that haven't yet been made into national parks. According to the WWF's surface area arithmetic, more than half of the land in Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina is still "unused", in Papua it's even 90 percent. Global agribusiness wants this land, and the WWF is doing nothing to stop it.

As a moral justification for their broad capitulation to agribusiness, the WWF and others resort to an apocalyptical scenario: if more land is not freed up for food and bioenergy crops, in 2050 there will be wars over land, food and water. When the planet is home to nine billion people, agricultural production will have to be double what it is now. But this alarming projection quickly collapses when you consider the fact that currently, half of all food produced spoils or is thrown away before it ever reaches the consumer. The WWF calculation also gives far too little consideration to the risks of globalized industrial agriculture based on genetic engineering and monocultures. The way of Monsanto and its partners is only one option, but by no means the only one.

For years now, the agricultural experts of global development policy organizations and the United Nations have repeatedly called for the support of local smallholder farming. This was the better way to produce enough healthy food, they agreed, and would remain so in the future. Personally, I am convinced that their arguments are better than those of Monsanto and the WWF, yet they continue to lose ground nonetheless. Agribusiness is powerful, well connected in a global network, and can afford to pay its lobbyists and appraisers handsomely. It doesn't waste its breath on long discussions, and before you can turn around, it has already set up shop.

The big players in the global agricultural and energy business are busy buying up land throughout the world. The WWF lends a civilizing veneer to this corporate land grab. The industry round tables are an especially useful tool here: the certification they confer for ''sustainable and socially responsible" production of ''strategic commodities" -- sugar, wood, biofuels, meat, fish, maize, soy and palm oil - amounts to little more than greenwashing. The certification business is booming -- and it's a nice little earner for the WWF.

The WWF plays its part in the global system of control that aims to implement a new world order. The organization collaborates with key agribusiness lobbyists and receives millions in funding for its certification systems: from national government budgets, the European Union, the World Bank, and even UN organizations. The WWF has become a political power. This is a result of the fact that during the 1990s Western governments handed over a large part of the bothersome task of nature conservation and environmental policy-making to non-governmental organizations. This privatization of sovereign duties created a vacuum of global proportions, which multinational corporations and a few NGOs have stepped in to fill.

A few dozen individuals who were never elected for the job are busy doing backroom deals that result in global policy decisions in the interest of their industry masters. Nothing less is at stake in these dealings than the distribution of the last exploitable land masses on earth. The protagonists of the global "green economy" have detached themselves from national governmental institutions. Decision-making processes are dominated by a few multinational mega-corporations that have wrapped their tentacles around the planet like octopuses. Their senior management is everywhere: on site in the rainforests and on the international committees where key strategic decisions are made. They move a lot more quickly than governments and international political commissions. It's not often that we get to catch a glimpse of the internal structures of this parallel world power; in general, only when an elected politician gets suspicious and starts "making trouble". In 1997, Guy Lutgen, Minister of Agriculture and the Environment in the Walloon Region of Belgium did just that, after the World Bank announced that it had formed a "forest alliance" with the WWF.

Via indirect channels, I came into possession of a highly informative correspondence between Guy Lutgen and the President of the World Bank at the time, James D. Wolfensohn. In a less-than-diplomatic letter from 1997 Lutgen warned of the alliance with the WWF. Back then the WWF was calling for at least 10 percent of the forests to be protected by conservation regulations. Lutgen did not want the World Bank to adopt this number. And he did not want private companies, hand-in-hand with the WWF, to be able to issue sustainability certification to themselves. "In what way is certification 'independent' if its rules have been drawn up by a handful of NGOs working with a few economic groups in the absence of monitoring by official organisations? ... Furthermore there is a risk that certain governments or companies would legitimize non-sustainable practices across 90 % of their forests by bringing 10 % of their less workable forests under protection." [69]

The Belgian minister's apprehension would prove justified. The sustainability certificates launched on the market by agribusiness and the WWF aren't worth the paper they're written on. Any shopper at a home improvement center can vouch for that: the FSC sustainability label is appearing on more and more wood products and furniture. Most people buy the certified wood in the belief they are doing something good for the rainforest. But do they also read the small print? In most cases, right next to the FSC logo is the harmless-sounding word "mix". But according to the rules of the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, that little word means that only 10 percent of the wood thus labeled must come from certified production. The rest may be from industrial tree plantations or recycled material. According to FSC principles, wood from illegal or unverifiable sources or overfelling is excluded. However, customers are offered no means of identifying the exact origins of the certified woods, so traceability is a non-starter.

In reply to his red-flag letter to the World Bank, the foresightful government minister Guy Lutgen received a friendly, non-committal missive from bank president Wolfensohn. He rejected the criticism and affirmed the strategic alliance with the WWF. His answer also managed to casually confirm that there was, in fact, a secret WWF plan, which foresaw the conservation of only 10 percent of the forests: "With regard to the WWFs minimum 10 % target for forest protected areas, we agree that priorities need to be set and close attention paid to determining adequate percentages for forest cover protection." [70]

In his letter Wolfensohn insisted that the certification systems be established and administered privately, and not by public authorities. After all, one important aim of certification was to kick-start the trade in tropical woods: "It may actually help avoid the imposition of trade barriers." That is the crux of the matter: the WWF alliances and the certification systems they produce are first and foremost about asserting the financial interests of private industry.

Thank you for your letter of September 9 with comments on the WWF/World Bank press release of June 25, 1997. I hope that the following will address and clarify your concerns about the WWF/World Bank Alliance.

With regard to the WWF's minimum 10% target for forest protected areas, we agree that priorities need to be set and close attention paid to determining adequate percentages for forest cover protection based on a case-by-case analysis of the situation facing each particular forest type. The key consideration here, we believe, is that forest protected area systems need to be fully representative of the biodiversity they seek to protect. Simply having a total of 10% of the world's forest under protection will not be adequate if the individual systems do not harbor representative and sufficiently sized samples of all forest types.

Fixing a percentage for protection serves to highlight the importance of promoting good management of forests outside of protected areas. Certification is increasingly recognized as one of a portfolio of tools that can promote forest management and conservation outside of protected areas, one that also serves to validate producer claims of good forest management practices. The concept of certification has received the support of several international bodies, including the IUCN which encouraged its members to be supportive of efforts to develop voluntary, independent certification of forest management and associated products labeling. Also, in a recent report to the Commission on Sustainable Development the International Panel on Forests also recognized that voluntary certification and labeling schemes are among the potentially useful tools to promote sustainable forest management.

While we recognize that certification is only one tool that can be applied to achieve good forest management, we fully accept that certification alone will not solve the larger problem of global forest degradation. Reducing degradation and loss of forests ...

Guy Lutgen wanted to inhibit the power of the WWF because he believed it to have no legitimation whatsoever: "It appears surprising that an international organization such as the World Bank is entering into an agreement with a non-governmental organization operating as a pressure group without democratic control on action such as certification which hitherto has not been the subject of approval by international bodies."

The concerns expressed in 1997 by the Belgian government representative fell on deaf ears. For the WWF, the alliance with the rich and powerful World Bank proved to be a brilliant coup. Since 1997 the World Bank and the WWF have often appeared in tandem wherever talk turns to the fate of the world's rainforests, be it in Sumatra, the Amazon, Papua or the Republic of Congo. When the power couple arrives to negotiate with the national government concerned, they usually come bearing a joint master plan for "sustainable forest management". They have the money and the might to enforce their strategy. When the World Bank/WWF has done its job in the vanguard, the modern conquistadores follow: energy and agriculture corporations then sweep in to do the dirty work, destroying the rainforests and the lives of those who inhabit them.

The Conquest of Papua

In his standard work from 2004 entitled 'World Agriculture and the Environment -- A Commodity-by-Commodity Guide to Impacts and Practices', WWF visionary Dr. Jason Clay claimed that in Indonesia alone there were still 20 million hectares of ''degraded'' land, which could be used for plantations. This number, which was presumably a relatively loose estimate, quickly found its way to the World Bank. It based its study 'Key Sustainability Issues in the Palm Oil Sector' on Jason Clay's figures and, on that basis, endorsed an expansion of the Indonesian palm oil industry by precisely 20 million hectares of ''degraded" forest area.

In case there was any ambiguity, the World Bank study kindly provided a definition of ''degraded'' forest:

"Degraded forests are those in which the structure, species composition, biomass and/or canopy cover are reduced from what is considered to be the original pristine forest cover of the area." [71]

According to that definition almost every forest on earth could be classified as degraded, and thus earmarked for clearance -- no matter how many human beings, great apes, tigers and elephants lived there. It just so happens that Cheng Hai Teoh, General Secretary of the WWF-founded Round Table for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), had authored the World Bank study. Before that he had held a senior post at WWF Malaysia. Everything comes full circle in the end.

Thus a network of self-appointed favored few is deciding the fate of nations, and even entire continents. Jason Clay's studies and statistical slight-of-hand are eagerly adopted by the agribusiness lobby, which spreads the word like a virus at industry seminars and congresses. And very often, before you can say "voluntary resettlement", it all ends in social violence.

Where exactly are those 20 million hectares of "unused and degraded" forestland that Jason Clay claims to have located in Indonesia? The island nation's main islands of Sumatra and Borneo have almost no primeval forest left to be cleared. Even the point men for the palm oil industry and the Indonesian Ministry of Finance in Jakarta put the country's potential for new plantations at just 10 million hectares at most. How did Jason Clay arrive at his 20 million? Had he perhaps included the land of the Papua in his calculation?

For years, the island of New Guinea, with its Indonesian provinces Papua and West-Papua, has been the Achilles heel of the Republic of Indonesia. Here there is still natural terrain as yet untouched by the ravages of the plantation economy -- fertile land that agribusiness has long set its sights on. The main problem for the corporations is: this land belongs to the native Papuan tribes. Whoever would try to conquer it risks no less than war.

After the end of Dutch colonial rule, Indonesia forcibly annexed Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea, and has since been engaged in trying to suppress the separatist ambitions of its people and to force them to assimilate. To break the resistance of the native peoples, a large-scale resettlement program has seen hundreds of thousands of people from other ethnic groups and other Indonesian islands moved into the conflict region. The Papua are now a minority in their own ancestral homeland, but they haven't given up on it yet; their bastion is the rainforest.

The right of the tribes to exploit the forests is anchored in the Indonesian constitution -- a result of international conflict-resolution intervention. Now, in a final push to absorb the Papua into the Indonesian nation, the central government is planning to take their forest rights away, on the grounds that the province must be developed economically. If the government gets its way, Papua Province will be transformed into a paradise for industrial agriculture: sugarcane, wood and oil palms. The World Bank is taking care of the financial backing of the project, and the WWF helps deal with related ecological and social "issues" as they arise.

In April 2007, high-level representatives of the WWF and the World Bank met in Bali with the governors of the Indonesian provinces of Aceh, Papua and West Papua. The participants were gathered at this round table to discuss the future of the Indonesian rainforests: which forests could be exploited for "sustainable economic development" and which should be preserved so that they could be used to earn money from the UN program for "avoided emissions"? The central government in Jakarta had set the target: in Papua alone, 10 million hectares of forest would be felled to make way for plantations. The government was also planning to enact legislation that would allow it to give the corporations a 95-year lease on the land. The law makes provisions for compensation payments to expelled "ethnicities".

At the close of the consultations the WWF and the World Bank announced their ''success'': instead of 10 million, a mere 9 million hectares of rainforest had been earmarked to become "economic zones" in Papua. One million hectares would be maintained as national parks. In fact, the WWF had only been able to negotiate the protection of 500,000 hectares; the other 500,000 hectares had already been a legally protected national park before negotiations began. The WWF has also played an active, expediting role in the practical application of the Bali decrees: the organization has cast itself in the role of cartographer, mapping out the land of the natives.

Ronny, WWF Indonesia

Ronny is the project manager of the WWF West Papua office, located in Merauke. On his office wall hung a map showing the future zoning of Papua: where were the tribal holy places that had to be protected? In which areas did the Papua have documented land rights, and where would the plantations go? The mapping process is a double-edged sword: in some isolated cases it can secure indigenous land rights; on the other hand, it can also legitimize the land grab of the invaders. When my journalistic colleague Inge Altemeier interviewed Ronny soon after the Bali meeting she asked him why the WWF stooped to aiding and abetting the industrial powers in their advance. His reply: "There was no chance of saving the forest, so we had to work together with the companies, so that at least a few high-value forest areas would be protected." [72]

The WWF man did not falter at the next question either. Who actually owned the forest that he was helping to divvy up? "The local communities. The land still belongs to the tribes." Did they know of the plan to plant 9 million hectares with oil palms? At this question Ronny shook his head and corrected me: "Here in Merauke Province it's only a million hectares. The tribes have to be informed, so that they know what's being planned. Otherwise they won't give up their land. That would lead to conflicts. Some of them are concerned: where will I live if I sell off all my land? They can't imagine working on a plantation themselves one day. On the other hand, some of them think: If I sell up for a billion rupiahs, I can live on the money for 50 years. They have gotten the message."

The WWF really does mean well, but had they ever bothered to ask the "savages" if they wanted to live in the brave new WWF world? It appears not. Their land is simply being subdivided into an economic zone and a nature reserve zone. The native inhabitants can no longer move freely in either.

On their visits to Papua villages WWF representatives tell the villagers that "new job opportunities" and "new sources of income" awaited them in tourism. In reality, these empty phrases amount to no less than the death of Papua culture. With the loss of their forest home the tribes also lose all traditional means of self-sufficiency and profitable production. They end up either as live exhibits in the ethnographic museum of the tourism industry, in the urban slums, or as underpaid casual laborers on the plantations. In the operation to expel the indigenous Papua, the WWF has played the part of the advance guard, providing ideological flank defense. This role is reminiscent of that of the Catholic priests 500 years ago who went into the primeval forests of South and Central America to familiarize the natives with the benefits of "civilization", easing the way for the Spanish Conquista that followed.

Kasimirus's Last Stand

Our journey throughout the green empire of the WWF ended in the village of the Kanume in Wasur National Park, on the border with Papua New Guinea. The terrain was austere: dry forests alternated with swampland. The WWF was proud of the fact that it had secured a safe haven for the Kanume tribe in the National Park, where they were safe from the clutches of the palm oil industry.My journalistic colleague Inge Altemeier paid a visit to Kasimirus Sanggara, chief of the Kanume, to ask him personally what he thought of the dramatic changes taking place in his homeland. On arrival she observed that the village of 90 families was under the guard of 80 Indonesian army soldiers. The national park was a heavily militarized zone -- because the Free Papua Movement, OPM, was fighting with bow and arrow against the Indonesian occupiers. In the Wasur area everything was under control, but every Papua knew how calm was being maintained in the country: many Papua had been incarcerated, tortured and killed; some had vanished without a trace.

Inge Altemeier's filmed interview shows Kasimirus Sanggara in all his native glory, looking like he's dressed up for the role of tribal elder in a Hollywood film: his face is decorated with war paint; great plumes of feathers on his naked, muscular arms signify his powerful standing. He was the man with a direct line of contact to the gods of the forests and the owner of the only bicycle in the village. Although soldiers were on hand to ''supervise'' the interview, the chief nevertheless expressed criticism of the park regiment: his tribe was no longer allowed to keep pigs, and hunting was officially prohibited in the core zone of the park -- for Kasimirus Sanggara an intolerable encroachment on tribal rights. The WWF offered in defense: although the hunt was officially forbidden, the authorities did in fact "tolerate" it. Conflicts with the palm oil industry were also out of the question, because according to the WWF, the entire Kanume tribal area was located within the Wasur National Park. Chief Sanggara, on the other hand, revealed that every year in June, at the beginning of the dry period, he would set off with his men for a five-month hunting foray beyond the boundaries of the park. The provincial government had promised there would be no plantations in the immediate area of the park but Kasimirus had no faith in the promises of the authorities.

Chief Kasimirus Sanggara

He had become acquainted with the WWF in its role as mediator between the tribes and the occupying power: "WWF staff were here to draw maps,", the chief remembered. They, too, had made him many promises: a new village, money, a school, and the prospect of earnings for the tribe from the sale of their eucalyptus oil. According to Chief Sanggara, most of the promises had not been fulfilled, and he thus took a dim view of the WWF, whose envoys had also kept silent about plans to introduce a hunting ban in the park.

Kasimirus Sanggara had attended meetings with the chiefs of other tribes, where, among other things, they had discussed a government initiative known as MIFEE: the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate project, the aim of which is to "develop" Papua economically. The Ministry of Agriculture wants to clear up to 1.9 million hectares of forest in Merauke district just to make room for oil palms, rice and sugarcane. The first agribusiness giants have already staked their claims in West Papua -- according to the research of Marianne Klute (Watch Indonesia) 500,000 hectares were approved for clearance in 2012. There has been a massive increase in illegal logging even within Wasur National Park, in the heart of Kasimirus Sanggara's chiefdom -- a sure sign of the rapid advance of agribusiness. Despite all the signs that should have triggered a red alert, to see that his world was facing certain demise was a stretch of the imagination too far for the chief.

With a sweeping gesture he described a circle in the air: "The soldiers have good weapons, but they wouldn't do anything to me; they respect me. If I wanted to I could cast a spell on them. The Gods and our ancestors live in the forest. The forest is the source of life. We protect it -- no one can destroy it."

Without the generous help of friends and experts I would have been unable to adequately negotiate all the material on which this book is based. My heartfelt thanks, therefore, goes to those who kindly offered their valuable advice, helped with the wording and engaged in useful critical discussions on the manuscript: Inge Altemeier, Nina Holland, Klaus Schenck, Guadalupe Rodriguez, UIlash Kumar, Nordin, Prof. Andres Carrasco (RIP 2014), Heribert Blondiau, Heike Schumacher, Konrad Ege, Raymond Bonner, Rene Zwaap, Reto Sonderegger, Javiera Rulli, Tibet Sinha, Arno Schumann and Marianne Klute. Very special thanks as well to the German TV broadcaster WDR, which allowed me to use the recordings and research data from my film 'The Silence of the Pandas'. I would also like to compliment my editor Hannah Blut on her astute questioning and fastidious post-research work, which put the crowning touch on this book. Last but not least, a big thank you to Ellen Wagner who worked wholeheartedly to create the precise and elegant English translation.

Wilfried Huismann

Born in 1951, Huismann studied history and social sciences. After a period as a development aid worker in Chile, he began his journalistic career in 1982 compiling investigative radio reports and authoring non-fiction books. Huismann went on to broaden his investigative scope to filmmaking, becoming one of Germany's most respected and successful documentary filmmakers. In recent years he has added screenwriting to his activities, including scripting episodes of the German cult crime series 'Tatort'. Huismann has been honored for his documentaries with three prestigious Grimme Awards in Germany as well as numerous international awards, including the World Medal at the New York Film Festival/ BANFF Rockie Award / Certificato di merito silver, Prix Leonardo, Parma / Screening at Telluride Film Festival. Wilfried Huismann lives in Bremen, northern Germany.

63. Hans Peter Fricker, head of WWF Switzerland, admits donations to Monsanto in an interview with the Neue Zurcher Zeitung from June 29, 2011: Niemand beim WWF will ein Feigenblatt sein.

64. Note on the agreed WWF Network response to criticisms of WWF involvement in the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) due to its links to Genetically Modified (GM) soy production. WWF Internal Document from February 17, 2009. Sebastian Lasse gave it to the author.